


this warm repair

by peterstank



Series: built from scraps [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Lots of drinking, M/M, The Gang’s All Here - Freeform, family bonding times, peter parker giving natasha romanoff the silent treatment for six months straight, pining! yearning! aching!, tw: violence/torture/character death/mental & physical trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:20:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 78,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24071272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peterstank/pseuds/peterstank
Summary: “America’s Next Top Model speaking.”May rolls her eyes. “Hey, do you happen to know if Peter showed up for work this morning?”There’s a pause. “Why do you ask?”“He left his phone,” May explains, perching on the edge of her nephew’s bed. “It’s not the end of the world or anything, I just thought it was…”“Weird? Agreed. I, uh—I can call down, hold on.”or: the aftermath
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Natasha Romanov, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: built from scraps [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1556035
Comments: 1130
Kudos: 830
Collections: Spider-Man Public Identity Reveal





	1. fucking off to russia

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO IT IS ME! 
> 
> some notes: 
> 
> -i changed peter and MJ’s dog’s name from virginia to indiana for... reasons  
> -if u have not read the little death, you really should if u want to understand what’s going on!!

TOSKA:   
  


“No single word in English renders all the shades of _toska_. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

— Vladimir Nabokov 

* * *

  
When Peter wakes up the next morning, he forgets for a minute. On instinct his hand stretches to the right side of the bed but only feels the soft cotton sheets. No body. 

No MJ. 

His breath catches in his throat and he sits up slowly, rubbing the sleep from his eyes before he rests his elbows on his knees. He feels heavy and dehydrated and empty, like he could stare at the door to his old bedroom all day and it wouldn’t matter. Time doesn’t exist anymore. He’s a compass with no direction. 

_I want you to go and I don’t think you should come back._

He’d read in one of his psych classes that the Kübler-Ross model of grief doesn’t just apply to losing a loved one: it’s any loss, anything worthy of mourning. Getting fired from your job, losing your house, breaking up with someone. 

Peter is pretty sure he’s in denial. All he can think about is going back home and apologising because he can’t just _accept_ that it’s over. Not after this long, not when she’s the reason he gets up out of bed in the morning. 

Still, he finds the strength to slide out of the sheets. Peter takes a quick, cold shower, and throws on his usual work clothing: slacks and a button down. Thank God he keeps a few outfits here just in case. It’s how his life has been ever since the Snap was reversed; kind of scattered everywhere across New York. He’s got three toothbrushes to his name and can’t keep track of his shoes these days. 

Peter is still working his shirt on when smell of something burning brings him to the kitchen. 

He stumbles out to find that May’s already climbed onto the counter and she’s fanning at the sensor with a newspaper. Peter grabs a magazine and does the same with the one in the hall until it stops. 

“Morning,” May says breathlessly. She’s got flour on her forehead and the counters are covered in various powders and bits of batter. “I made breakfast.”

Peter inspects the pile of mostly burnt, slightly edible pancakes. He smiles and kisses her cheek. “Thank you.”

Pleased with his response, May slips down and grabs him a plate. They end up sharing one, working around the charred parts. It’s like ninety percent syrup and thank god for the chocolate chips she’d sprinkled in. 

“So how are you holding up?”

Peter shrugs. There’s not one particle in his body that wants to discuss this right now. He just wants to go to SI and drown himself in paperwork or a new project or something. 

But May says, “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“You know what,” she pokes his ribs, “don’t shut down on me, baby, I hate it.”

“And yet it’s sort of my brand.”

Her lip twitches. “You just had a huge fight with your long-term girlfriend. There must be something going on up here.”

Peter ducks so she can’t knock on his forehead. He starts clearing the plates and wiping up. “We didn’t have a fight, we broke up.”

“Yeah, the same thing happened with Mary and Richard once, and the next thing they knew they were having you. And _married_.”

“Yeah?” he asks, kind of shortly. 

May sighs. “Peter… I know we haven’t gotten the chance to actually talk about your mother—”

He interrupts her before she can keep going. “That’s okay, we don’t have to.”

“ _Peter_ —” 

“I just really don’t want you to have to rehash all of that—”

“No, but I _need_ to,” she tells him firmly, sliding off the stool and grabbing his hand. “I knew her, you know? She was one of my best friends. She was my _sister_ and I—I had this complete bomb dropped on me and now everything is… it’s all muddled and confusing and I just… I can’t be alone in that. I _know_ I can’t.”

“You’re not.”

“Right, so—so talk to me. Please? What are you feeling?”

“I honestly don’t know. I mean it’s… it’s hard to concentrate on something like that with everything else going on so I just… I _don’t_ think about it, you know?”

May brushes his hair out of his eyes. “Well I’ve been thinking about it. A lot.”

“Really?”

“Really. I still don’t know what to make of her being an internationally acclaimed terrorist, or whatever, but I remember _her_.”

Peter hums, collecting a handful of crumbs from the counter. “I don’t.”

“You’re shutting down again.”

“I am _not_.”

“Peter,” May says, serious now, “I need you to know that she loved you. I _know_ that she loved you. She never would have left you if she’d had the choice to stay.” 

“I know that. I’m not angry at her.”

“Yes you are.”

“No—”

“Peter Parker, I don’t care how long I was dead for, I will always be able to read you like a book and you are _pissed off._ ”

His shoulders fall. God, he doesn’t want to talk about this. He doesn’t want to talk period. He would rather bury his head under a pile of sand or catapult himself into space without a suit. 

“Maybe.”

She gives him a look.

“ _Yes_ ,” he says, rolling his eyes. 

May is silent for a moment. Then she reaches out to fasten the last button on his shirt. It’s such a small thing, but it makes the back of his throat burn. All he can think about are all of those times she wasn’t there to fuss: his high school graduation, his college ceremony, his senior prom...

His senior prom with _MJ_. 

God. 

“Before she died she started teaching at this little studio not far from where you guys lived. She would take you there and—do you remember that place? Ophelia Dance? Ben and I re-enrolled you but the prices were so steep, so we had to transfer you to that little dingy one after a year or two.”

“I liked the dingy one,” he whispers quietly. 

May looks up at him. “She lied to both of us, and I’m angry but I… I still miss her.”

He’s still thinking of what to say back when his phone rings. Peter pulls it out of his back pocket and heaves a deep breath before he answers. “What?”

“I need you to come to Steve and Bucky’s,” Natasha tells him, and fuck she sounds bad. He doesn’t think he’s heard her voice shake like this since she called him about Scott during the Snap. “Come alone. Don’t take your phone and don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Bring your emergency bag.”

Peter’s spine straightens. He frowns. “Is something wrong—?”

“ _Just come,_ ” she hisses, and hangs up.

May is staring at him. “What was that about?”

“Uh, nothing,” he lies distractedly. “I’ve gotta get to work early, okay? Thanks for breakfast.”

Another kiss of her cheek later and he’s rushing out the door with the pre-packed duffle he keeps in the closet by the front door. 

* * *

Steve snores. 

Like, obscenely loudly. 

He always has, and Bucky’s been used to the sound for a while: back in his army days, it had actually been hard to fall asleep without it. 

But now he’s a light sleeper and every so once in a while, Steve will just fucking _hork_ , all loud and horrific. Bucky’s eyes fly open at the sound and he stares for a minute, heart pounding, trying to get his bearings. 

Bed. Pillow. Two nightstands on either side: Steve’s wallet and watch and alarm clock—a little black digital thing that reads 10:01 AM; even his fucking snores are punctual—bathroom door, and…

Bucky rolls onto his back and sits up.

“Romanoff,” he says warily. “What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?” 

“We have a problem,” she replies hoarsely.

That’s around when Bucky notices how pale she is, almost like she’s gonna be sick. She’s shaking a little where she stands even when she tries to cover it up. 

Bucky reaches for Steve to wake him up, but she says, “ _No_ ,” and then, “just come downstairs. Now.”

Bucky glances at Steve again. “Natasha—”

“ _Now_ ,” she practically growls. 

Bucky sighs and rolls out of bed.

* * *

She’s sitting on the couch in the living room but when she sees him, she shoots to her feet. 

At first Bucky doesn’t recognise her, and then her jaw tightens and he just _knows_ , just remembers the way it happens sometimes—all at once. Pieces falling into place like an avalanche: her as a little girl with those big green eyes, staring up at him with all that kid wonder, walking her fingers up his metal arm and tapping the old Soviet star; older and angrier, straddling a bench in front of him with one of his cigarettes dangling from her lips; even older than that, dancing around him in the fighting ring at that old HYDRA base; and worse, the later memories: him hurting her, hitting her, and… 

“Oh shit,” he breathes. “ _Maria_.”

One second there’s all this space and then there’s just nothing; she lets out this broken little sob and holds him, lets herself be held. “James,” she says, the only one in a million years to call him that. 

She’s his best girl. How could he ever have forgotten? 

“I’m so sorry,” he says, eyes shut tight and burning. “Fuck, I’m _so_ sorry. What I did—”

“What’s this?”

Bucky rips away at the sound of Steve’s voice. He finds him in the doorway with his hair all messed up, still flushed from sleep and dressed in pajamas. 

“Stevie,” Bucky says, “this is, uh…”

“It’s Maria Petrov,” Nat says from where she stands against the wall. Her arms are crossed and her body is completely rigid. Bucky had almost forgotten she was there. 

“Maria Petrov,” Steve repeats slowly, an eyebrow raised.

“More commonly known as Mary Parker,” Nat elaborates. “Peter’s mother.”

Steve’s eyes widen. He looks from her to Maria to Bucky and back again. “I thought you were dead.”

“Just what I was meaning to ask,” Bucky says. “How the hell are you alive, all-spice?” 

Her cheeks flush a little. “I’ll explain everything, I promise, I just—”

Before she can finish, the doorbell rings. “That’ll be Peter,” Nat announces, her voice dangerously flat.

Maria looks at her sharply. “You _called_ him?! What the _fuck_ , Nat? This was not part of the plan—”

“You didn’t tell me the plan, so I made my own,” she replies, and brushes past her sister to open the front door. 

Bucky’s enhanced hearing catches the sound of Parker’s quippy greeting (“You beckoned?”); Nat replies in that same dead, terrified voice. Footsteps, and then: 

Parker stops. His mouth opens. Closes. 

Maria steps forward. “Peter—”

“You lied to me.”

Parker’s remark isn’t directed at Maria, but rather Nat: he stares at her and his face is hard like it had been during the battle that day, when he was facing down that son of a bitch Thanos. 

Nat, if possible, grows paler. “Petya, you have to understand—”

“I don’t have to understand _anything_ ,” he says, quickly losing his temper—and Bucky’s been through a lot of tough shit with a lot of guys, and he knows when one’s about to go off the rails. “You lied.”

Her shoulders square. “Yeah.”

“So how long have you really known for?”

“Since 2005,” she replies faintly. 

He just _barely_ keeps from exploding. Bucky can see all that tension wrung up in his body. He runs a hand down his face, eyes wide and wild. “Did you know about me?”

“No,” she says quickly. “No, I swear to God, I didn’t. I only put the pieces together when you asked about her and I found out about Richard—”

“ _Bullshit_ ,” he says, and pulls something out of his pocket: a folded up piece of paper. “I’ve been meaning to ask, you know, because I showed you that three _fucking_ years ago and you really expect me to believe that you didn’t know? You, a world-class espionage artist? You couldn’t recognise her handwriting?”

“I swear to God,” there are tears on her face now and her voice is shaking; Bucky’s never seen her like this. “I swear to God, Peter, I didn’t know. I never knew about Richard or you—”

“That’s really convenient, Nat.”

“It’s true,” Maria says suddenly. “I never told her about you.”

Peter looks at Maria like he’s just remembering her existence. He blinks and pinches his brow. Takes a deep breath. “What the fuck is happening.”

Nat tries to reach out but he steps out of her grip. “Don’t,” he grunts. “Do _not_ fucking touch me right now.” 

“Petya—”

“ _Natasha_ ,” he retorts hotly, “ _no_.”

They all stand in petrified silence for a minute. Parker rubs at his face. He looks fucked up to say the least. Then he sucks in a deep breath and faces his mother again. “I saw you when I was dead,” he says slowly. “Or dying, I guess. Comatose. How is that possible?”

This is obviously not what she’s expecting to be asked. Maria takes a step closer but stops when he stiffens. “You and I share an ability,” she says slowly. “Do you remember when you were little and you had all of those nightmares?”

Peter shakes his head. “Every kid has nightmares.”

She presses on. “You were dreaming about my dead grandfather. And your dead grandmother, too. Every night for weeks.”

“I don’t remember that.” He starts to move now, pacing in a short line in front of the foyer. “I remember seeing her before you though, after I Snapped. So what are you saying? That that wasn’t just like, your average in-between limbo shit? It’s because I’ve got some kind of power?”

“Some of my power, yes,” Maria nods. “As far as I know that’s about all you inherited from me, unless you can teleport now or move shit with your mind.”

He stops. “You can teleport?”

Her lip quirks up. “I can, yes.”

“How far?”

“Pretty far.”

“What’s the furthest you’ve jumped?”

“London to New York.”

“You were in New York before this?”

She nods slowly. “The day of the Snap. I was coming to check on you when… anyway, the next thing I knew your apartment with May had been foreclosed and you were a world-renowned mutant.”

“And I knew the truth about Tony.”

Her cheeks colour again. “Yeah, that too.”

“Half of the letter is just bullshit, right?” He asks, holding it up again. “I mean I figured, but it was nice to pretend, y’know? So how’d you really meet him?”

“New Years, like I said. But I wasn’t there for the gala. I wanted to see if I could get my hands on his Extremis research so that I could… cure myself.”

“Cure yourself,” Peter repeats flatly. 

“Of my abilities.”

His eyes narrow. “Could that work?”

“In theory, maybe, but it would be incredibly dangerous.”

“But it skips a generation?”

“Maybe,” she says, “yes, as far as I know. But it’s not just one contained gene, it’s… interwoven through my entire genome.”

“Right,” Peter nods. “Right. Yeah. Cool. So why the hell are you here? _How_ the hell are you here?”

“I missed you.”

“Oh?” He laughs. “That’s—that’s rich, okay. Thanks, glad to hear it. How about the real reason?”

Her face softens. “I missed you,” she repeats. “And you know the truth.”

“Do I know the truth? Do I? Because I’m really starting to think that I don’t know anything and all, and what’s worse is the _one person_ I thought I could trust has been _lying to my face for months!_ ”

Nat’s jaw tightens. “You were willing to forgive me when you thought that I’d killed her—” 

“That was a mistake, this was deliberate. There’s a difference.”

“What, so it’s worse that she’s not dead?!”

“No!” He bursts. “It’s worse that you fucking lied to me about it!”

“I’ve spent my entire life learning how to lie my way out of everything!” 

“Oh, don’t you _dare_ pull that shit on me! I know you’re better than that!” 

“It’s not my fault your first instinct isn’t to question what you’ve been told—”

“You’re my _sister_. My first instinct is to _trust you._ ”

Nat winces. “I was trying to protect Barnes. He’s already trying to repent for killing your grandparents, you think he needed this on his conscience?!”

“Five fucking years!” Peter explodes. “I’ve killed for you! I would have died for you! I held your heart in my hands after you got shot and saved your fucking life, and _this_ is the way you repay that loyalty? If you’d been worried about Barnes, you could have told me in private and you know it! You didn’t have to hold a goddamn family press conference and spew a bunch of bullshit! Jesus _fuck_ , Natasha! God!”

He turns away from her and rubs the back of his head, distressed, while she stands there with fresh tears in her eyes. “I was just trying to protect you,” she whispers. 

“From what? From HYDRA? From her?”

Nat wipes her cheeks. “I…”

“I asked her to,” Maria pipes up. She looks shaken. “I told her to lie to whoever asked. It’s not her fault, Peter.”

Parker stares at her and then looks at Natasha. “ _This_ ,” he says, gesturing between them, “trumps _that_.” 

Nat sucks in a sharp breath. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you. You’re my family, Peter. You mean more to me than _anyone_. Why would I want to hurt you?”

Peter shrugs. “I don’t know, Nat, but you’ve done a pretty damn good job so far.”

Another pause. Parker rakes a hand through his hair and then says, “I need to get out of here.”

“You can’t,” Maria says urgently, stepping forward. 

Nat looks just as frantic. “No one can know about this, Peter.”

He shakes his head miserably. “You think I can’t keep a secret?”

She steps in front of him, blocking the way to the front door. “What are you gonna do? Go get drunk? You can do that here.”

“It’s true,” Bucky pipes up, voice a little raw from disuse. “There’s liquor in the kitchen, help yourself.”

Parker thinks for a second and then makes a beeline for it. Bucky, meanwhile, plops down heavily on the couch and reaches for a pack of Strikes. He lights up. 

Steve is hovering close by. He’s anxious and it would be evident to even the least observant person on the planet. Bucky watches him but still starts a little when he speaks. 

“You called him James.”

Maria looks up. “Pardon?”

“James,” Steve breathes. “You called him—like you’d done it before…? You knew who he was?”

Maria’s face changes to visible confusion and she glances at Nat, whose eyes are round again. “Of course. Nat and I found out when we were still teenagers—”

“Oh my god,” Steve says. “Oh my—Nat, what?”

“Shit,” she whispers. “Steve, I… fuck.”

He grips the back of the couch for dear life, mind working a mile a minute, and Bucky can tell the full extent of it is just beginning to register. He reaches out. “Stevie, baby, it’s not a big deal—”

“Not a big deal? We were looking for him for _days_ before I found out he was alive,” Steve rasps. “You _deliberately_ didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t know if I could trust you!”

“After New York?!” Steve demands wildly. “After _Jersey?_ You could have told me that day at Sam’s! You had all the opportunity in the world—”

“I didn’t know how you’d take it,” Nat says earnestly. “We were in the middle of a shitstorm, Steve. I was just trying to keep you alive, I didn’t need you to go running after Barnes and getting yourself _killed_.”

Despite trying not to, Bucky winces. Steve glances at him sharply but Bucky waves him off, sucking in another drag of his cigarette, feeling more uncomfortable than he has in a long damn time. 

That’s around when he realises Maria’s slunk off.

* * *

Peter’s holding a bottle of scotch by the neck and he’s got his head inside the freezer. 

He hears her coming but doesn’t look up. He can’t even find the willpower to open his damn eyes. All he feels is anger, boiling in the pit of his stomach and turning his blood hot.

But the freezer is helping. The freezer is good.

Nice freezer. 

“I saw you once when you were thirteen,” his mother tells him. Her voice is soft and despite his anger, he finds himself comforted against his own will. “It must’ve been before you got your powers. You were in the school yard and you were drowning in this big orange sweatshirt.”

Peter tries to remember an orange sweatshirt, but he can barely remember anything before yesterday. Maybe… 

“The Mets,” he whispers faintly. 

“What?”

“Ben got me that sweatshirt,” he says as it all comes flooding back. “Well, he gave it to me. It was his. Then it was mine. Then it got all bloody when he died in my arms.”

That’s why he hadn’t remembered it: the police had confiscated it as evidence and he’d blocked the whole thing out, really. 

Now he _is_ remembering it and it’s… not nice. It’s very not nice.

Mary Parker looks a little sick. “Oh.”

Peter takes another swig of scotch. Mattie the dog sniffs around his legs and he reaches down to let her lick his palm. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Oh.”

* * *

Steve feels like he’s gonna vomit. 

He can’t look at Nat. She won’t look at him either. They sit in a dead silence until finally the sound of footsteps make them all look up.

“I’m leaving,” Peter announces with finality. 

“Peter,” Nat says, “if you go back to May’s, you’re putting her in danger—”

“Oh, speaking of May: there’s another person that should absolutely be privy to this wonderful tidbit of information, don’t you think? Unlike you, I have no plans to keep her in the dark.”

Nat grabs his arm. “I’m serious. If you leave, you could fuck us all over.”

“What, you think we’re being watched?” Peter demands. 

Maria and Nat are both silent. He blinks. “You think we’re being _watched?_ ”

“I don’t know,” Maria says. “I just know I took a huge risk coming here. I was with HYDRA for a long time after Richard died, Peter.”

“ _What?_ Why?”

“The trigger words weren’t bullshit,” Nat says. “She’s just like Barnes. Can’t control it.”

Peter runs a hand down his face. “Jesus Christ.”

“I have no idea what they know,” Maria says. “I tried jumping from place to place to get them off my tail, but you can never be too careful with them. What’s more, they could already have someone stationed to watch James.”

“So what, you want us to hide out here indefinitely or something?”

“No,” Nat says, “we need to figure out a plan to take them out once and for all.”

“I thought you guys already did that,” Peter says. “Pierce is gone.”

“I have reason to believe there’s a new figurehead,” Maria says. 

“And who would that be?”

“Thaddeus Ross.”

Steve and Peter both stiffen. They look at each other and Steve is pretty sure they’re both thinking about the same thing: _that fucking bastard._

“Cut off one head and two more will take its place,” Bucky intones bitterly. 

“Well that’s really cute,” Peter snaps, “seeing as the entire team just signed away their international liberties to the guy.”

“Which is exactly what he was aiming for,” Nat says darkly. 

“So then why the hell did _you_ sign?”

She shrugs. “Have to keep up appearances, but I’ve been suspicious of Ross for a while now.”

Peter snorts. “Who hasn’t? The guy doesn’t even bother to hide his agenda under all of that… political pontificating.” Then his face hardens. “Wait, I’m not agreeing with you. I’m still pissed off.”

Jesus Christ, if Steve closes his eyes he could swear it’s Tony in the room instead. 

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Nat says forcefully.

“Oh wow look at that, it’s all better now! Thanks Nattie!”

“Queens,” Steve cuts in, “everyone here is upset, okay?”

“Leave him alone,” Natasha defends, to everyone’s surprise. “He’s going through a lot.”

“Yeah, leave me alone, I’m going through a lot,” Peter agrees. Then he scowls down at Nat. “Don’t matronise me.”

She puts her head in her hands and groans. 

“I thought it was ‘patronise’,” Bucky says.

“No, that’s only grammatically correct if it’s a man doing it,” Peter tells him.

“Or is it that it’s patronisation in every sense except when it’s a woman being demeaned?” Steve asks.

“Enough!” Nat snaps. “We have important shit to discuss.”

“Yeah, like where’s the vodka,” Peter says, holding up the half empty bottle of scotch Steve had bought last week. “This shit tastes like piss.”

“It’s Highland Park!” 

“It’s very not good,” Peter calls over his shoulder. Nat follows after him and there’s a relative calm before they both start yelling at each other again. Steve puts his head in his hands to massage his temples. He hasn’t had a headache this bad since he woke up from the ice. 

* * *

Peter is mid-yell when he’s struck by a thought: that sweatshirt. The day Ben had died was the first time he’d worn it. How could she have…? 

He pops back around the corner. “Ben’s death,” he says, “that wasn’t an accident, was it?”

His mother doesn’t breathe. Her back is ram-rod straight, eyes wide with fear.

“No.”

“Oh my god.” Peter feels sick. He can’t look at her. “Oh my god. What the _fuck_. What was it then?”

“It was punishment,” she whispers, horrified. “I acted out and they didn’t like it so they sent someone—”

“ _Someone?_ Or you?”

At that she bristles. “It _wasn’t_ me.”

“You’re acting like that’s totally out of the left field when you _just_ told me that you literally faked your own death and carted me off to my aunt and uncle, who _barely_ had the financial means to support themselves, and _on top of that_ you lied to your own husband about him being my father—I mean what the fuck, is this a Spanish soap opera or something?” 

He wants to break something or scream. His heart is pounding so fast he’s pretty sure if it weren’t for his enhancements, he’d have had a heart attack by now. As it is he finds himself clutching his left arm anyway, kind of keeling over with phantom pains. 

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” his mom is saying. “I loved Ben, Peter. He was my _brother_ —”

“Yeah, and I was your son!” Peter explodes. “You still abandoned me, didn’t you? Doesn’t really seem like family meant that much to you.”

To his surprise she scowls. “I left _because_ of you. I was trying to _protect_ you. Do you actually think I wanted to spend a _second_ away from you? Do you think this was easy for me?! Because let me tell you something, it was a fucking far sight from it—”

The lightbulb above the dining nook shatters into shards. She stops and, without even looking at it, reaches her arm out and twists her wrist. It reassembles like it’s breaking in reverse. 

“I did it because I thought it was best for you,” his mom is saying. “I was worried that HYDRA would come after you, that they might send James—”

“Huh,” he says, completely preoccupied with the lightbulb he’s just unscrewed and inspected. Peter taps the perfectly formed glass. “Whacky.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening,” he replies faintly. “I just don’t believe you is all. But hey, don’t take it personally, it’s mostly Nat’s fault.”

Nat slams the blinds covering the partition to the kitchen all the way to the right, revealing her rage-face. She brandishes a knife at him. It still has jam on it. “How long are you planning on holding this over my head for?” 

“Longer than an hour.” Peter screws the bulb back in. “So what’s the other thing?”

His birth mom frowns. “What other thing?”

“The other thing you haven’t mentioned yet that you need our help with,” Peter says plainly. “I mean, why else would you have really come back? Call me paranoid, but it’s all just really convenient timing. Like, right after Tony and I release that article for the Times? Within which I openly call Nat my best friend?” He shakes his head and steps closer. “I’m not an idiot. You only came now because you learned about how close we are. So what is it? It affects you both, right? I’m not wrong?”

Now Nat is looking at Mary too, all confused, and his birth mother is just kind of staring at him with this weird look on her face. 

It’s almost like… pride? 

“The serum that they injected us with is gonna go bad soon.”

Nat’s eyes widen. “What do you mean?”

“I _mean_ , my knee started hurting again—the one I busted up the day they took you,” she says to Bucky. “And then a couple months later I found a grey hair. And I’ve noticed it’s—it’s harder to do things. I’m not as fast or as strong as I was before. When I use my powers too much I’m out for days instead of just hours.”

Nat’s face is white as a sheet. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know.”

“So… so what do we do about it? Make another one?”

“No,” Mary shakes her head. “But I think I might know where we can find some. At least, I have a few ideas.”

“Your ideas tend to lead us into death traps, Maria.”

She shrugs. “I’d rather go out fighting than get weak and wilt away.”

Peter looks between them. Then he pinches the bridge of his nose. “So you’re both like dying or something?”

“Essentially.”

Well that’s just great. That’s really… really fantastic.

He sucks in a sharp breath. “Awesome. I need a minute. I’m just gonna—bathroom—”

He barely slams the door shut before he heaves into the toilet. 

Peter grunts dazedly and flushes it down, breathless and panting. He turns to the sink, leaning against the rim, chest heaving. He runs the tap to cold and rinses his face and then, when his heart stops slamming erratically in his ears, he slowly sits down on the bathroom floor. 

The tile is cool and refreshing. His eyes close.

But being alone with his thoughts isn’t any better: all he can think about is last night and MJ, and Nat, and Maria. God, everything sucks. It really does. All that stability he thought he had is totally just falling apart, isn’t it? Had any of it been real in the first place or was it all just a carefully crafted illusion: thin webs strung with careful, talented hands?

He scratches the top of his head and thinks about calling MJ before he remembers he hadn’t brought his phone. 

Peter closes his eyes. He thinks about her, forcing himself to filter out all of the bad things and just remember the good: hiding under the bleachers during the absolute joke that was Post-Snap gym class, holding hands everywhere they went without even realising they were doing it; that time she’d shown up at Pepper’s when he had sensory overload and she’d carefully moved around him, making sure to be completely quiet, gently running her hands through his hair and pressing soft, feather-like kisses to his face and neck and shoulders and chest; that one night they’d gone to the beach and gotten drunk and skinny dipped; when she’d called him after Sam and he’d held her like she was glass and she’d told him, later, that she loved him; when she’d started showing up at the compound late at night and they would end up stumbling to his room, kissing and ripping at clothes with a kind of drunken fervour that left him buzzing all over and breathless. 

Even the smallest things: doing the dishes together, kissing the back of her neck, watching shitty daytime TV together and cursing out the idiots on the programs—fuck, just holding her. God, he wants to hold her. He’s so sorry. He doesn’t think he can do this. How is he supposed to do _any_ of this without her? 

Someone knocks on the door and Peter jumps, quickly wiping his cheeks dry. 

“You good, Parker?”

Peter rinses his face again and dries it just as quickly. He opens the door. “I’m good,” he says to Bucky, even though he’s decidedly Not Good.

* * *

They’ve all gathered in the living room again. Peter is pacing in a line, occasionally scratching at the back of his head in an irritated fashion that reminds Nat of Tony so much it’s like, _cathartic_. Steve is sitting on the leather reading chair bouncing his knee and staring at precisely nothing. Bucky is chain smoking and frowning. Nat asks, “So what are we looking at here?”

Maria shrugs. “Weeks, at least.”

Peter runs a hand through his hair. “Jesus. Why?”

“Because I have absolutely no idea where the serum actually is—assuming we can find any at all,” Maria says. “And also…”

“Also?”

She purses her lips. “Yelena.”

Nat’s head shoots up just as Barnes whispers, under his breath, “ _Solnechnyy svet._ ”

She can’t fucking believe this. She can’t believe any of it, but _especially_ this. “You want us to try and find her?”

“Well don’t you?” Her sister asks, all earnest. “She’s our sister, Nat.”

Peter pauses. “Wait, I’m sorry— _what?_ There are more of you?”

“Just Yelena,” Maria says.

“ _Maybe_ Yelena,” Nat corrects. “How do you even know she’s alive?”

Her sister shifts uncomfortably. “I’ve seen her with them. With HYDRA, I mean. They did the same thing to her that they did to me.”

Nat covers her eyes with her hand. Jesus, this just gets better and better doesn’t it? First Maria pops up out of nowhere and completely ass-fucks Nat with no warning, and now she’s gonna get dragged across Russia looking for a serum and her brainwashed sister. It’s exactly how she wanted to spend her summer.

But the alternative is a slow and painful death, so it’s not like she’s got a choice.

“Where do we start?”

“The Academy,” Maria replies, leaning forward. Now she’s intense. Nat can’t help mirroring her position. “If that fails, we go to Siberia.”

Nat shakes her head. “Nothing like a trip down memory lane.”

Maria smirks. “That’s what I was thinking.”

“You sure you’re up to this?”

“If you are, I am.”

Nat raises her eyebrow. “I got the serum a year after you did. It’ll take longer for me to deteriorate.”

“Yeah, but even weaker I’m still better than you are.”

“ _Suka_ ,” Nat snaps. 

Her sister grins. 

Everyone is staring. 

* * *

  
  
“Can I sit?”

Peter shrugs a shoulder. “Not my porch.”

Steve hums a little and lowers himself down beside Peter. They’re perched on the back steps overlooking the small yard where Mattie and Ralph are playing. Mattie’s got the good end of a tug-toy in her maw while Ralph snaps pitifully at the other end of it and pees when Mattie growls. 

“Don’t know what I’m gonna do with ’em when we’re gone.”

Peter looks over at Steve. “You can’t come.”

“Pardon?”

“He’s not gonna let you,” Peter says knowingly. “It’s all over his face. He’s been saying goodbye to you with his eyes for the better part of an hour—”

“But I—”

“You’re a hero,” Peter finishes. “And you’d die to save him. It’s the last thing he wants.” Steve frowns. “Besides, I… someone has to stay with the kids. Help them out. I can’t just leave Gwen and Miles alone like that.”

“You want me to train them up for you?”

“I mean, if you wouldn’t mind. They’re—okay, I was about to say they’re low-maintenance but that’s total bullshit. They’re not intimidated by me, though. They will be with you, at least for a while, so you’ve got that going for you. Just be really gentle with Gwendoline, okay? She’s had a rough life and I—I just always do my best not to be too tough or aggressive. And with Miles… he’s too high-strung. He’s got this big heart he doesn’t know what to do with, so you need to help him find ways of channeling it. I’m trying kick-boxing and cat-patrol on weekends with one mugging allowed per month as long as there’s no gun.”

Steve stares. Then, quietly, “What about the others?” 

“Cassie’s in California with her dad right now, but Ariel and Charlotte spar with Nat and Buck twice a week. You’ll have to ask about them. But Charlie—she’s been through a lot of the same stuff as Gwen, but you kind of have to use the opposite mindset; she wants you to know she’s tough shit, so you have to let her show it. She’s also got a mean right hook so watch out for that.”

Steve smiles a little and nods. They’re silent for a minute, listening to the beat of the city, the chirping of summer cicadas. 

Then Steve pulls out a rolled up joint and asks, “Got a light?”

Peter grins. He pulls out his lighter, a scratched silver thing with MJ’s initials engraved on the front—he’d totally stolen it and supposes it's one of those things he’s going to have to return someday. He can’t imagine it: them doing that Breakup Thing where they divvy up all the items they own. Their books, the records they’ve collected, their pictures. 

_Indiana_. 

He takes a drag so he doesn’t throw up and then passes it over. 

“You remind me a lot of myself, y’know.”

Peter raises an eyebrow. “How so?”

Steve rests his elbows on his knees. He’s a massive dude, but all hunched over like that, he kind of just looks like a regular guy. He looks like _Ben_ , actually, and suddenly Peter’s startled by all the similarities between Captain America and his dead uncle. 

“We’ve both got that hero complex, I guess. Too stubborn. We were both asthmatics. I don’t know. Maybe it’s stupid, but I see myself in you. I don’t have to ask whether or not you’re gonna do things, I just know you’ll do them. Like how I know that no matter how pissed you are at Nat, you’d still give your own life to save hers.” 

“Is that your weird way of warning me to keep an eye on her, Rogers?”

He laughs. “If that’s how you wanna interpret it.”

Peter’s quiet for a minute. Then: “She lied to me.”

“So did Fury,” Steve points out. “Are you mad at him, too?”

“No.”

“Why not?” 

Peter gives him a side-long look. “Because Fury isn’t my sister.”

Steve nods. “That’s fair. Speaking of Fury, what did he want with you and Nat after the signing?”

“Oh, y’know, the usual,” Peter leans back and sparks his lighter, watching the flame burn bright orange and then flicker blue, “just to intimidate one of us into taking his job.”

“Pardon?”

“Yeah. He wants to retire by the end of the year.”

Steve shakes his head in wonderment and then asks, “Why not me?”

“Your thinking is too black and white,” Peter states flatly. “You see things your way and you’re not inclined to compromise when facing a disagreement. Nat, on the other hand, is as grey as it gets. That’s why Fury wants her.” He flicks on the lighter again. “Or me.”

“Jesus.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What’d Tony say?”

“I have vague recollections of him threatening to murder Fury,” Peter says, “but then the conversation shifted to other things.”

“Well,” Steve clicks his tongue, “you might be tough, kid, but you’re way too young to run something as big as SHIELD.”

“I’m way too young for all of this,” Peter agrees quietly. “I’m too young to have almost died, I’m too young to be… god, I’m just so tired. I’m tired of all of it. Fuck Fury, _I_ want to retire.”

“You know as well as I do that once you’re in, you’re in. There’s no getting out of this life.”

“Yeah. It’s that hero complex thing. Sometimes I wish I could just not feel that way. I wish I could be selfish.”

Steve looks at him. “No you don’t.”

“No,” he sighs out smoke, “I don’t.”

He feels kind of lightheaded now, just bordering on high. It’d be nice if it lasted. Maybe he should commission Shuri into manufacturing some mega-metabolism proof weed or something. 

Mattie comes running up with her braided pink rope in hand and drops it at Steve’s feet like an offering. He scoops it up but instead of throwing it for her, tugs her closer and hugs her, pressing kisses against the top of her head. Her tail wags. 

“I need you to do me another favour.”

“What’s that?”

Peter meets Steve’s eyes. “Keep an eye on Pepper and Morgan for me, would you? Just… offer to help Pep where you can, maybe babysit Mo, I don’t know.”

“You don’t trust Tony with that?”

“Of course I trust Tony,” Peter whispers. “I… God, it’s like: I _know_ he’s a good dad, right? Because he’s my dad, and he’s great. He makes me feel safe and loved and appreciated and all that stuff, but with Morgan…”

Steve stares. And then he gets it.

“You feel like the dad.”

Something inside of Peter just withers. “I didn’t mean to. It just happened, you know? You change enough diapers and build enough forts and give enough baths and suddenly it’s just… and I can’t just stop feeling that way. I spent half a decade with her as like, my primary concern. Everything kind of revolved around her, and now it’s like expected of me to take this step back and let Tony handle everything, let Tony be the parent, and I want to. I _want_ to step back, I’m trying to… to be less involved, or to be as involved as I should’ve been in the first place…”

He trails off for a second, watching the red lights of a slowly descending plane flash against the night sky. 

“It was an accident,” he whispers helplessly after a minute. “And now I don’t know what the hell to do.”

Steve’s eyes have all this sympathy in them, but it’s not the overbearing kind. He’s a real Goldilocks kind of guy, now that Peter thinks about it: never too hard, never too soft. His flavour is immaculate, simply chef’s kiss—

Peter is way higher than he’d thought. 

Steve says, “I’ll look after them.”

And Peter says, “Thank you.”

And they finish their joint in companionate silence, unaware of the figure that’s been sitting by the open window, quietly listening this whole time.

* * *

Bucky wakes up in the morning with an aching back. 

He’d fallen asleep on the couch even though he barely fits as it is. Nat is curled up like a cat on the chair at his feet, and Maria is nowhere to be seen. 

Steve leans over him. “Hey, Buck.”

“Hey, sweetheart.”

Yesterday was a long day, but one of the up sides of living half your life as a Soviet Soldier is the ability to compartmentalise. It already feels like a fever dream. Bucky’s taken what he needs from it and he’s leaving all of the unnecessary emotions in the past. 

He reaches up to touch Steve’s beard, running his thumb over his lower lip. God, he’s gonna miss this. 

Steve closes his eyes and leans into Bucky’s palm, before kissing the inside of his wrist. “I made coffee.”

“I knew there was a reason I loved you.”

Steve makes breakfast as the rest of them wake up. Peter, for some reason, emerges from the bathroom. Apparently he’d crashed in the tub even though there’s a perfectly good, usable bed upstairs. 

Whatever. Bucky gets weird coping shit like that. 

They gather around the dining nook and go over a map amid the clamour of Steve’s pots and pans and sizzling bacon. It’s almost not weird, but there’s all this tension underneath and it doesn’t go away even when the food is served. 

Finally someone brings up the brilliant question of how the hell they’re even gonna start their search. 

Peter shifts uncomfortably. 

“I might have an idea.”

* * *

They drive out to the compound without Steve. As Peter’s walking inside, he calls: “Disable all surveillance and security features, FRIDAY.”

There’s a pause. “Authorisation code?”

“Mongoose.”

Another pause, and then, “Done.”

“Thank you. Open Hangar 5 for me too, would you?”

“On it.”

“And I’m overriding your protocol for alerting Tony of any suspicious activity. As a matter of fact, shut down all operations beyond basic electrical functions for five hours.”

“But I—”

“I’ll do it manually if I have to,” Peter tells her, even though he hates it. FRIDAY hates going to sleep even just for maintenance or system updates. 

She powers down, though, and he can tell somehow that it’s done with great reluctance and even resentment. Or maybe that’s just his conscience playing tricks on him. 

Peter leads them to the hangar where the Quinjet is waiting. It sits innocently against the backdrop of the freshly mowed grounds. “Can someone start loading up our shit while I disable the trackers?”

Nat jumps at the opportunity, but Peter ignores that. He has decided to ignore her entirely, as a matter of fact, no matter how petty and juvenile it is. 

Peter retrieves a toolkit from the supply area against the wall. Then he climbs aboard the jet and makes for the console where he knows the first one is located. He slides underneath and sets to work: unscrewing the bottom panel and working through the wiring to find the device. He’s just located it when his ears perk.

He doesn’t even have to look to know that it’s his mother who sits down beside him. 

“So you take after your dad, then.”

He can’t help it. His lip quirks and thank God she doesn’t see it. He doesn’t want her getting the false impression that he’s somehow cool with her. 

“If you mean I’m technologically inclined, then yeah. Hand me that tri-wing, would you?”

“Which one is that?”

“It’s the one that looks kind of like a peace symbol but without the circle,” he says, and a few seconds later it’s in his hand; her fingers, warm and calloused, brush his palm. “Thank you.”

There’s a small silence and then, “You’re different than I thought you would be.”

Peter’s hands pause. “How did you think I’d be?”

“Softer,” she whispers. “I’d _hoped_ , anyway. With me not being around, I…”

Peter swallows roughly. “I was,” he says after a second. “Then everyone died and I had people to take care of, so I had to change. Phillips?”

She knows what a Phillips looks like and gives it over. 

“You keep saying things like you being around would have been bad for me. It’s like you don’t get that you being gone was just as bad, or something. I don’t get that.”

Mary takes a deep breath. “I know you don’t.”

“You wanna explain it to me?”

“I don’t really think it would matter if I did,” she tells him. “I don’t think it matters what I say. You’re not stupid enough to take someone for their word alone, are you?”

Peter chews on that. “No,” he says. “Can you hand me that socket wrench?”

“I guess I’ll just have to show you,” she says as she hands it over, and this time when they touch something happens. He remembers something he shouldn’t even be able to: him in a bath full of bubbles, her arms around his shoulders, her brown curls tickling his neck. _Mommy loves you_ , she whispers, and he can _feel it:_ an avalanche of pain and regret and so much love it’s almost unbearable.

He rips away, eyes wide. 

“How’d you do that?”

She shrugs. “How do you think?”

Shakily, he returns to the tracker, working his jaw. “Don’t,” he says eventually. “I don’t like my mind messed with like that.”

“Does it really count as messing when it’s real?” She asks. “It’s just a memory, Peter.”

“Well maybe I don’t want to remember it,” he counters, ripping the tracker free. He ducks out from underneath the console and stands. “Pro-tip: reminding me of what we had before you abandoned me isn’t gonna do you any favours.”

* * *

Bucky doesn’t expect to see Steve again. They’d said their goodbyes as he was packing his bag to go: rushed and kind of frantic, he’d explained to Steve why it was best he stayed behind. They’d kissed once, on his way out the door, but it’d been chaste and shallow and left him starving.

Now his big idiot is walking up to him holding a round leather case Bucky could recognise anywhere.

“What the hell, Steve?” 

“Brought this for you.”

He hands the case out and Bucky takes it. “Don’t you think this old frisbee’s just a little too colourful for a covert op?”

“Open it,” Steve says in reply, grinning a little.

Bucky unzips the flap and sees, to his great shock, that the whole thing has been painted black. For a few seconds he just stares because it’s all he can think to do. Then, voice a little shaky, he asks, “You sure about this? What if you need it?”

Steve looks at him like he’s stupid. “I need you more, Buck.”

And that’s right around where Bucky’s limitations on not kissing the fuck out of his boyfriend end. He grabs Steve a little roughly, but Steve grabs him right back like always and, as usual, what starts hard melts into something softer. Steve tastes like mint and strawberry; he smells like cedar wood; he always cradles Bucky’s pulse point when they kiss like because his eyes are closed, he needs to rely on touch to make sure Buck’s still alive.

He will remember that. 

Steve pulls away. Their foreheads touch. “Don’t come back to me in a box, alright?”

“Can’t make any promises.”

“Hey,” Steve says, “those are Captain’s orders, understood?”

Buck grins. Gives him a jaunty little salute. “Yes, sir.”

“Well I just got a terrible glimpse into your sex life,” Natasha says as she passes to load more shit onto the Quin. Steve turns red either from embarrassment or anger or both, but Bucky just laughs. 

Changing tactics, Steve asks, “Are you sure you don’t want me to come?”

“I said I’d follow you into the jaws of death, not the other way around.”

“But I would,” is Steve’s immediate reply. 

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees, lip quirking up, “it’s why you’re not coming.”

It’s also because Steve, for all of his finesse and skill, still doesn’t know shit about espionage. In fact the stupid idiot tends to stick out like a sore thumb wherever they go, and even with the beard people recognise him and ask for pictures. 

Steve is fluent in five different languages and he can knock a guy out without batting an eye. 

But Bucky can speak seventeen. And he can do the same thing with a guy, only he can take it one step further and commit murder without losing any sleep over it. 

Steve tries to avoid that sort of thing.

“Buck—”

“Listen to me: things are probably gonna get bad here and there. I don’t know how long we’ll even be gone for and I’ll probably be tempted to call you for back up at least once, but just do me a favour and _don’t come._ ”

“But what if they get you again?” Steve asks. “What if—”

“They can’t,” Bucky promises gently, “not like before. Shuri took care of that, okay? And I promise there ain’t nothing they could do to my head that could ever make me forget you again.”

Steve’s whole demeanor softens. He strokes Bucky’s hair and the tip of his ear, which is pretty much Bucky’s Magic Spot. He tends to curl up like a cat when Steve touches him there, but this time his head bows and he puts his hands against Steve’s stomach, the hardest and softest part of him. Steve leans up and kisses Bucky’s forehead. 

After a second, Bucky straightens. “Take care of Mattie and Ralph for me, okay? Make sure they get to play with Indiana at least two times a week or they get upset. And don’t forget to feed that stupid cat—”

The jet is firing to life, whirring loudly behind them. “Buck—”

“I love you, Stevie,” he says, because he’s lost him enough times to know that he should just say it: whenever he wants, as often as he can. “I love you so bad, you hear me?”

Steve’s breath catches. There are tears in his eyes. “I hear you.”

“Good.” Bucky kisses him one more time, just because he feels like it, and then shoulders the shield and runs aboard. 

He stops at the mouth of the jet and turns around. “Don’t tell anyone where we’re going, okay? The less people that know, the better!”

The doors shut before he can hear Steve’s reply. 

* * *

24 Hours Earlier

Harley makes her tea.

“Ginger,” he says as he sets it down on the coffee table without a coaster. “Helps with morning sickness.”

“Thanks, Dr. Keener.”

“Hey, I could just have easily not done it.”

MJ rolls her eyes and leans forward to grab it. She stares down at the foggy amber liquid in her mug, complete with a lemon slice and everything. She’s careful not to let it spill as Harley plops down on the couch opposite her. 

They stare at one another. 

“So this, uh, situation. How developed is it exactly?”

“I don’t know. Six weeks maybe? It’s hard to tell because my periods were all fucked up after the miscarriage.”

Harley frowns. He takes a long, exaggerated sip of his drink and then asks, “I thought you went back on birth control?”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“One hears things when one lives in the same house as someone else,” Harley replies ominously. “Also, Peter told me.”

MJ frowns. She’s not exactly mad about Harley knowing, but again: it’s just another one of those things Peter decided to do without telling her. She glares out the window. “I wasn’t exactly… when you get out of the habit of doing something it can be hard to get back into the habit...”

His eyes widen over the rim of his big Baymax mug. “You _forgot to—_ ”

MJ covers his mouth with her hand even though they’re alone in the house. She slowly lowers herself back into her haunches, eyes narrowed dangerously. “Don’t say it. Please don’t remind me.”

“Don’t you know that it’s not 100% effective if you don’t take it every day?!”

“Yes I know that!”

“So why would you—?” His eyes widen even more. “You didn’t _forget_. You _sabotaged_ this pregnancy into existence!”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“ _No!_ ” MJ repeats. “Really, I didn’t. But I did… I mean, I knew I’d forgotten to take it a couple of times and I didn’t say anything. I just didn’t think it would come to anything, you know?”

“But it did.”

“I’m _aware_.”

“Christ on a Ritz,” Harley mutters, shaking his head. “I can’t believe you’re this smart but this fuckin’ stupid.”

MJ kicks him. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“No, seriously. Backwoods hicks know more about sex than you do—”

“Harley, I swear to god—”

She breaks off at the sound of keys in the lock and for one whole second she thinks it’s Peter, she thinks _oh, thank God_ , and then comes the voices of Ariel and Charlie as they bicker with each other. 

Her shoulders slump. “Shit.”

Harley looks at her sadly. Then he stands. “Ladies,” he says, clapping his hands, “if you skedaddle into the kitchen I’ll whip y’all up some waffles.”

Ariel whoops and tears down the hall. Harley follows after, but to MJ’s surprise, Charlie lingers. 

“Sleepover okay?” 

A shrug. “They’re mostly Ari’s friends, so…”

“Oh.”

There’s a pause.

“Where’s Peter?”

“Hmm? Oh, we broke up.”

She tries to say it casually like it doesn’t mean anything at all, but her voice breaks toward the end and suddenly her eyes are full of tears. Furious, MJ turns back to the window and wipes them as they fall. 

“Why the _hell_ did that happen?”

MJ makes some kind of noise and swallows a mouthful of hot tea. 

Charlie perches on the coffee table. “Shelly?”

“It’s complicated,” she whispers. “Adult stuff, okay? You don’t need to worry about it.”

“ _You_ need to stop sheltering me so much.”

“I’m not trying to shelter you, I just don’t think you need to deal with my bullshit, okay? You’re just a kid and you’re already going through enough.”

“But I can help—”

“Charlie,” MJ says, serious now, “let it go.”

Her sister’s shoulders fall. She frowns down at her lap. “For what it’s worth, I think he’s a good guy. Like, kind of impossibly good. You guys always had that ‘once in a lifetime’ soulmate sort of thing going on and… I don’t know. I just think whatever he did… it can’t be worth letting all of that go, can it?”

And if that isn’t a question for the ages, MJ doesn’t know what is. 

She stares after her sister without really seeing and thinks about last night. Everything they’d said, everything _she’d_ said—had she meant it? She thinks so. But had he?

MJ had known at some point that he would bring up the baby they’d lost. She’d known he was upset about it even if she’d never said. 

So what right does she have to do that again? Regardless of where they are, doesn’t he have a right to know? 

Hesitantly, MJ digs around for her phone and finds it buried somewhere between the fluffy blanket she’s got wrapped around herself and the couch. She finds no notifications from Peter; just an email from work and a few texts from Ashley. 

MJ ignores those. She goes to her caller list and spends a good solid minute debating whether or not to actually click on Peter’s name.

It’s too soon. He’ll think she’s calling about the breakup.

But she has to talk to him at some point, right? Like, they have to iron everything out, don’t they? 

“Fuck,” she whispers, and calls him.

It rings exactly five times before it goes to voicemail. MJ takes a deep breath and says, almost too late, “Hey, it’s me. I um…” God, what is she doing? “We need to talk. Just call me back when you get this, okay? I…” 

She stops herself before she can say _I love you_ and hangs up with a short goodbye. 

* * *

There’s a ringing coming from somewhere in the apartment that May hears as she’s getting ready for work. She scrambles to find the source and misses the call by just a few seconds: only it had been Peter’s phone that had been going off, not hers. 

May stares down at it in abject confusion. Sure, yeah, it’s not like it’s out of the realm of possibility that he just totally forgot it, but also… it’s weird.

May used to get on his case for always being on it and now she knows she doesn’t exactly have the right to, what with him being an adult and all, but even she has grown sort of attached to the little brick in her pocket. She panics if she ever loses it, assuming it’s been stolen during her train ride home or at work or something, and she’s gonna lose all of her data, and then Peter will put his hands on her shoulders and talk to her about clouds and drives and backups and stuff. 

A missed call from MJ is the first notification on the home screen, and as she’s frowning down at it, a voicemail pops up, too. 

May bites her lip. She pulls out her own phone. 

“America’s Next Top Model speaking.” 

May rolls her eyes. “Hey, do you happen to know if Peter showed up for work this morning?”

There’s a pause. “Why do you ask?”

“He left his phone,” May explains, perching on the edge of her nephew’s bed. “It’s not the end of the world or anything, I just thought it was…”

“Weird? Agreed. I, uh—I can call down, hold on.”

May waits, and while she does, she studies the room. It’s a good three times bigger than the one he’d had in Queens, with framed posters on the walls for Star Wars, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. The sheets are a high thread count. The window behind his four-poster mahogany bed is curtained, but May knows if she were to crack the blinds she’d have a nice view of Central Park down below. 

“He’s not there,” Tony says after a minute. 

“Really?”

“Really. That’s where he said he was going?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she stands, starting to get jittery now. 

“He specifically said SI? He didn’t mention stopping anywhere else?”

“No, he didn’t. He got a call from someone and left in a rush and I thought—”

“How long ago was this?”

May tries to think. “I don’t know, two hours? Maybe three?” 

“Where else could he be?” Tony asks. “MJ’s?”

“No, she just called him. Is there any way you could track him or something?”

Another pause. “He doesn’t have his watch on, his suit is—it’s reading that it’s in your apartment. It’s all there: watch, suit, phone. God, I knew I should have implanted that tracker in his ass, what the _fuck_.”

May takes a deep breath. “Okay, let’s both just calm down. We don’t know that anything is wrong. Have you texted Pepper maybe?”

“Yeah, good idea, hold on.”

May bites her nail and starts pacing back and forth. She’s not even thinking about work anymore. 

“She says she hasn’t heard anything from him since—wait, he and MJ broke up?”

May’s stomach drops. “Yeah.”

“Fuck,” Tony whispers. “Okay. _Fuck_. Alright, um, come down here would you? We need to coalesce with this thing. I’ll call MJ and see if she has any idea where he might be.”

“Yeah, right,” May nods. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

She hangs up. Takes a deep breath. Puts a shaky hand over her mouth and then rushes out of the apartment.  
  
  



	2. mushroom hunters

  
“Espresso?” 

Steve blinks. At four in the morning and he’d opened the door to go on his usual run, only to find Tony Stark and Michelle Jones standing on the other side of it.

“It’s a doppio.”

Steve sighs and steps aside to let them in. 

_Here we go,_ he thinks.

* * *

12 HOURS EARLIER 

  
  


Tony calls MJ. 

She doesn’t pick up. 

So, being panicked out of his mind and completely desperate, he goes to her place and bangs on the door with half a mind to stay there until she opens it—either that or just break the damn thing down. 

Only no one is home. The kids are all at school, Harley at SI, and she’s gone to work.

By this point Tony is kind of pulling his hair out. He gets back in the car and tells Happy to step on it, and then proceeds to send MJ a series of embarrassing, insistent texts that she _fucking answer her phone right fucking now please and thank you._

She’s been in a counselling session the whole time, it turns out, and has her phone on airplane mode. When he shows up at the office in an absolute state, MJ goes right into therapist mode: sits him down on the couch and tells him to start from the beginning.

“He’s gone,” Tony says. “Just—poof! No security footage, no note, no nothing. We can’t find him _anywhere.”_

MJ looks sick. “What do you mean?”

“I _mean_ what I just said. Gone as in: completely vanished. He took the quinjet and as far as we know, Nat went with him.”

“Nat?”

A shrug. “She was the last person to call him and no one’s seen her since.”

MJ stares. 

“Did May tell you what happened? With us, I mean? The fight?”

“Yeah, she did,” Tony says, “which is why I need to know if he told you anything, or if he said anything—” it starts to get hard to speak, “—anything drastic, or like—”

“Oh come on, you can’t be serious—”

“See that’s the thing, because I am!” He shoots out of his chair and runs a hand through his already messed up hair. “I know that we’re practically strangers, you and me, but we both care about him, okay? So I need you to be honest with me. I need you to _think.”_

“He just said he was going to May’s,” MJ says. Her hands are wrung and her knuckles are white and she’s all huddled into herself. “That’s all he said.”

“Nothing about a mission? Suspicious activity? You haven’t seen him looking into anything lately?”

“ _No.”_

Tony sighs. He scrubs a hand down his face. “Okay. Fuck. Alright. I’m sorry, kid.”

She waves him off. Says, “It’s fine,” and goes over to the window to glare out of it. 

He really doesn’t know her very well. They’ve had a few conversations here and there about pretty mundane, everyday things. He knows she’s passionate and opinionated and brutally honest, but those are all things he learned from Peter. Tony is suddenly unsure that they’ve ever been alone in a room together before right now. 

“He left his phone?”

“Yes,” Tony says. She knows that already.

“Have you tried anyone else? How long has he been gone for?”

“I don’t know. He barred FRIDAY from notifying me for at least five hours, which is long enough for them to get just about anywhere in that fucking jet _and_ he disabled all the trackers. I have no idea where the hell he could be.”

He sits down heavily on the creaky little coffee table. MJ wipes her cheek dry and then turns to look at him. 

“None of this makes sense,” she whispers. “I just… I don’t get it. Why would he just _leave_ like that? Leave everything, all of us out of the blue?! It’s not _him.”_

Tony feels the back of his throat start to burn. “I don’t get it either.”

“Do you think maybe he was coerced? Kidnapped?”

“I don’t know,” he says, in the smallest voice. “Doesn’t look like kidnapping, though. Pep said he had a go-bag in the closet by the door and that’s gone. He knew he was leaving.”

“ _Fuck.”_

“Yeah.”

MJ is quiet for a long minute. Then, “What if it was me?”

Tony can tell she doesn’t mean for her voice to sound so small, but it comes out that way anyway and it’s obvious she _hates_ it. 

He grabs her hand. “It wasn’t you. This isn’t your fault.”

“Yeah? Because I said some pretty fucked up shit. Like, worse than anything I’ve ever said before. I mean, God, I kicked him out of the _house,_ you know? I _broke up_ with him.”

(With _Peter._ With the guy who used to surprise her on the weekends by showing up at her dorm, holding a bag of her favourite takeout and Ben & Jerry’s. Peter, who took care of her every time she got sick and used to kiss her nose to make her laugh and always held her the same way every night: his arms wrapped around her stomach and his head tucked into the crook of her neck, and sometimes he’d kiss her there too, muttering stupid things in his sleep. Peter who has to be the most selfless person she knows, and… God, what has she _done?_ What the fuck was she _thinking?_ )

MJ sits down heavily. She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes. 

“Fuck. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”

Tony scoots closer and, after a moment, gently grabs her wrists and pries her hands away. “No it’s not,” he whispers. “This is… a culmination of a lot of things, alright? If it’s your fault it’s my fault too, because he as good as told me he was too stressed out a couple months ago and what did I do? Nadda.”

MJ swipes the tears from her cheeks again. “Shit.”

“Hey, no need to be embarrassed, I’m pretty weepy about it too.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s just these fucking _hormones._ ”

It takes a minute for him to register what she’s said and then he feels himself _stiffen._ “I sincerely hope you’re referring to Lady Time related hormones and not _pregnancy_ hormones.”

“Why?” MJ asks. “What do you know?”

Tony leans away, mouth parted, mind racing a mile a minute. “Shit. Fuck. God—how far along?”

“What does it matter?” MJ demands. “What are you not _telling me?”_

“It’s—it’s uh, complicated—”

“Oh, _bullshit!_ I’m so fucking sick of hearing that! I’ve been kept in the goddamn dark for months, Stark! I have a right to know why the mere _mention_ of a baby makes you and Peter shit your pants for some reason—”

“Oh my god, did he know about this? Did you tell him the other night?”

MJ’s brow furrows. “No, why?! What, you think he would’ve _skipped out_ or something? Because that’s _ridiculous—_ ”

“No, no, I just…” Tony is on his feet again and he doesn’t remember standing. He looks down at her: this twenty-two year old girl who’s carrying his _grandchild_ right now. Despite the circumstances he feels an overwhelming rush of _joy._ He knows he shouldn’t, is well aware of how dangerous it all is. 

But wow. 

A _baby._

Tony sighs. “You’re right. You deserve to know more than anyone else. Come with me.”

* * *

MJ doesn’t know what the hell she’s looking at.

They’re in the lab at the tower. He’d grabbed a couple of chairs, set them in front of his monitors, and pulled up some scans. 

“This is a map of Peter’s genome.” 

MJ frowns at him but says nothing, deciding to wait instead. If she’s learned anything about the Starks it’s that they like to ramble.

Stark takes a deep breath and plunges forward. “There are a lot of normal, standard strands here—basic human DNA, markers for eye colour and hair colour, all that—but you took biology, I don’t need to explain the basics to you. Anyway, you and I both know that he has uh, mutations—”

MJ rolls her eyes. “If you’re trying to warn me against this because the kid might come out predisposed to climbing on walls, believe me, that’s already occurred to me.”

“It’s not that. Well, it is that, but also: no. See, his fucked up genes don’t stop there.”

She feels her heart skip a beat. “What do you mean? What, like there’s something wrong with him?”

“Not with him, no, but maybe for your kid.” Stark bites his lip. “MJ, Peter’s mother was born with mutations of her own.”

MJ is quiet for all of two seconds and then, “I’m sorry, _what?”_

“We only found out a few months ago. Nat kind of unearthed the whole thing and I mean, I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice to say: Mary Parker had a fucking rough go of it. Anyway, she had abilities. I’m not sure about the specifics of them, but I know that they were pretty damn dangerous and harmful. Peter was… he was trying to prevent passing them on, but he hadn’t figured it out yet and…”

“And now I’m pregnant.”

Stark nods. “Yeah.”

MJ looks at the scans. She narrows her eyes at certain marked sequences—the spider mutations she guesses, which are twisted in an entirely different direction from the rest—and shakes her head. “Why wouldn’t he tell me?”

Stark shrugs. “I really couldn’t say. Maybe he didn’t wanna bother you with it. I know if it were me—fuck, it might as well be—I tend to, uh, keep shit close to my chest until I’ve found a viable solution.”

She feels like she’s gonna be sick again. Hopefully there’s a trash can nearby just in case. “So what’s the danger here? Do we even know?”

“Not really,” Stark says, “seeing as she died and it was all kept pretty hush-hush. But there’s… there’s danger for you, kiddo.”

“How so?”

“Well, Mary’s mom died giving birth to her for one thing.”

MJ feels her face twist. “Great. So what about Peter? Why isn’t he all fucked up?”

“Still haven’t fully figured that one out yet. The problem with it is that it’s not just a singular mutation, it’s scattered all throughout, so something over here might be dominant while something over here might be recessive, and without looking at _her_ genetics I can’t really mix and match, can I?”

MJ swallows. “So what do I do?” she asks roughly. “Because I’m not—I don’t wanna get rid of it, I mean, I already lost one and I—”

Stark takes her hand and yeah, she’s definitely not the touchy-feely type, but for some reason with him it’s not weird. He’s just so confident in everything he does that she can’t find it in herself to question it. He cares. Like, too much. 

Or maybe just enough. MJ can’t decide.

“I’m not saying you have to. I’m gonna… I’m gonna figure this out, okay? I’ll make it safe for you, I promise.” 

It’s what Peter was trying to do. For months he was holing himself up in his office at SI and staying up late into the night at home. _This_ is what he was working on. 

And yeah, it was stupid of him not to tell her and idiotic not to at least warn her about how _serious_ not having a kid was. He should have explained everything and she’s pissed that he didn’t. 

But it does make her a little less upset, for some reason. That whole time she’d thought that he was just doing regular work stuff: choosing projects over her, _avoiding_ her. 

Instead he was trying to figure out a way that they could have a family. 

“He’s such an idiot,” she finds herself whispering now. “I bet there’s a fucking gene on here to prove it, huh?” 

Stark grins and clicks his tongue. “I resent that.”

“I’m glad we can agree that out of his various parental figures, you’re absolutely the one responsible for all that stupid. It’s not even a question.”

He starts laughing, but his expression falls as he looks back at the screens. “How long do we have here?”

MJ shrugs. “I still need to see an OB but… around seven months, I guess.”

He nods. “Alright. I can make that work. We’ll set you up with the best doctors, we’ll monitor everything and do every test, okay?” 

“Yeah,” MJ says. “Okay.”

She decides to ignore the sickening sense of dread building in her stomach. 

* * *

May calls at around one in the morning after getting off her shift. She’d gone in despite not wanting to at Tony’s insistence: he was gonna handle everything, he was gonna find Peter, everything was gonna be fine.

But Peter is still missing when she clocks out. Tony kind of wants to fling himself into the sun when he has to tell her that.

“ _Mamma mia,”_ she says, voice tinny on the other end of the line. “Okay. I’m gonna go home and take a shower.”

Tony blinks. “That’s it?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” she snaps back, “because what the fuck else can I do? Sit around and wait for him? Put up posters around town? No. I’m covered in baby vomit, I’m sweaty and greasy and disgusting. I’m gonna take a shower and then we’ll talk about what to do next. Got it?”

He bites the inside of his cheek. God, he loves May Parker. “Loud and clear, Miss Maybelle.”

“Shut the fuck up, _Antonio,_ ” she returns, and hangs up. 

* * *

Tony has Happy stop at a niche, hipster cafe. He orders coffee for himself and for Steve. 

He has no active suspicions as of now. All he knows is that he’s called exactly three times and no one has picked up, and when he tries Bucky’s secret burner phone he doesn’t get an answer either. Which means… something, he just doesn’t know what. 

Michelle gets a gross matcha drink and they walk to Steve’s.

* * *

“So where’s Barnes?” Stark asks as they walk deeper inside the townhouse.

Steve shrugs. He’s wearing a long-sleeved black running shirt and his hair is all messed up. There are bags under his eyes, too, which doesn’t make sense because the guy is basically a vampire. 

“Not here.”

“Not here?” MJ asks. “So where?”

Rogers offers a long, suffering sigh and then says, “Listen, I think we can cut the bullshit here. We all know that they’re gone.”

MJ’s stomach flips. “So they’re all together? Barnes is with Peter?”

“ _Yes.”_

“And you just, what, decided not to let us know?” Stark demands. “Didn’t think that was pertinent information we should be privy to?”

Rogers, unbothered by Stark’s tone, sits down at the kitchen table and dumps his espresso into his already huge mug of coffee. “I was asked not to tell you. Figured I’d take an ass-kicking from a twink over one from Romanoff. Besides, I don’t know anything more than that.” 

MJ sits down across from him. “They didn’t give you any indication of where they were going? You didn’t see them leave?”

“No, Michelle.” 

“You haven’t heard anything since? No calls? No texts?” 

Rogers shakes his head. He looks tired as fuck, honestly, like he’s just as broken up about Barnes being gone as they are about Peter. But still… 

MJ leans back and squints. “You wanna know what I think?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re a fucking liar,” MJ says flatly. “Scratch that, I _know_ it. Wanna know how?”

Rogers has the audacity to roll his damn eyes. “How?”

“Because of this whole unbothered act,” MJ states. “You literally chose to exile yourself rather than be separated from Barnes before, but now he just up and leaves and what—you don’t give a shit? Bull. You know something and it’s about time you _fessed_ the _fuck up.”_

Rogers stares at her for a long minute without speaking. Then, “You got spunk, kid.”

Stark clears his throat. Sits down. “Everyone in this room wants the exact same thing—” 

“No, I don’t think we do.”

Stark frowns. “Pardon?”

“Well, if I were speaking from a hypothetical place here,” Rogers says, shifting in his seat, “hypothetically: say I did know a few things, but they’d instructed me not to share any of them—would it be morally right of me to do so? I mean it’s not like they’re a bunch of kids, you know? They’re adults. They chose to leave of their own accord.”

Stark’s eyes darken. “While that may be true,” he says tightly, “Peter is still _my son._ And I have a right to know _where my goddamn son is_ if I want to. So if you do know something Rogers—hypothetically speaking—fucking _out with it.”_

Rogers taps the table and leans back. He looks from Stark to MJ and back again. “It’s not my place.”

MJ and Tony both react at the same time, but in an inverted fashion: Stark shoots out of his chair and takes a few aggravated steps away from the table, rubbing the back of his head. MJ on the other hand, simply sips her drink. 

She can play Rogers’ stone cold bitch game.

“What do you mean they told you not to say anything?” 

“I mean just that,” he says mildly. “They didn’t want to put anyone else in danger. And I _don’t_ know anything beyond what you do. They’re together, they took the jet. Said something about Russia, but I don’t know anything specific. That’s all.”

MJ stares. “You’re lying.”

Steve throws his hands up. “Christ.”

“Oh, don’t act like this is some outrageous request here,” Stark snaps. “This is my—this is my _kid,_ okay?” His eyes are wide and wild and his hand goes to the housing unit at his chest like he wants to claw his own heart out. MJ gets that. “This is my baby boy, do you understand that? If you know _anything_ and you’re not telling me, cut that shit the fuck out now. We agreed, didn’t we? Honesty? A truce?”

Rogers chews on that for a good while. Then he stands up, collecting his dishes from breakfast. He dumps the scraps into Mattie’s food bowl and she comes running. 

It’s while he’s standing at the sink that he says: “Nat came. She said something about needing Bucky’s help. Peter showed up a little while after and they started planning. Buck and I… we got into a bit of a fight about it. I wanted to—to go with, y’know, but he told me to stay planted. Peter asked me to help with Gwen and Miles. Then they took off.” 

“So you just rolled over? Just like that?” Stark shakes his head. “Guess we know who wears the pants in the relationship.”

Rogers gives him a look. “I wasn’t exactly in the best state of mind.”

MJ frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I _mean,_ I found out… Jesus. I found out that Nat knew. About Bucky being the Winter Soldier, that is. She’d known for years actually.”

Stark stares for a long minute. Then he sniffs. “Not so nice, is it? Finding out that someone you trust is keeping secrets from you? Kind of sucks dookie ass, actually, if you’re asking me.”

Rogers leans against the counter. “That’s all I know, Tony.”

Stark practically collapses into the chair he’d vacated before. He hunches over and puts his head in his hands. “ _Porca puttana.”_

MJ’s never seen him like this before and kind of hates it. It’s like they’re feeling the exact same thing in the exact same moment. She pushes down the wave of discomfort and exposure that threatens to strangle her. 

Stark looks up at Rogers again. “There’s a twenty-four hour window and I can’t fill it. I can’t figure it out. _Why_ do I feel like you already know everything I need to? Why do I feel like you’re lying to me?” 

“I’m not lying.”

“Lying by omission is still lying. We’ve had this discussion before.”

“ _Tony.”_

“Damn it, Steve!” Stark slams a hand down on the table. The salt and pepper shakers rattle. 

They’re all silent for a minute. 

Then, “Was he okay?”

She almost doesn’t want to ask. Her voice comes out small and thick. Rogers looks up and meets her eyes and his own are so sad. “No, I don’t think so.”

He doesn’t offer anything else and MJ doesn’t press. She looks away, eyes burning and blurry, and tries her absolute hardest not to start sobbing right there in the middle of Steve Rogers’ kitchen. 

Mattie comes prattling up to sniff her. MJ buries a hand in her fur and leans down to hide her tears. 

* * *

Pepper is on the phone when Tony walks into her office a couple of hours later. She hangs up as quickly as possible. “Anything?”

“Hey, baby.”

“ _Tony.”_

He sucks in a sharp breath. Tries to speak but finds that he just can’t. 

Pepper pushes out of her chair. “God. Okay. What do we do then? What can we… what can we do?”

Tony shakes his head helplessly. 

Nothing. There’s nothing to be done. 

* * *

TWO WEEKS LATER

The sheets smelled like him for a while. 

Then the scent left, so MJ caved and washed them. That’s okay though because she still has a handful of sweaters and hoodies that are just so overwhelmingly _Peter_ that when she closes her eyes, she can pretend he’s right there with her. 

MJ’s wearing a faded MIT sweatshirt now. She has her nose buried in the collar as she types up an email to a client, apologising for having to reschedule their appointment on account of an ultrasound she can’t get out of. 

She looks up at the sound of the door unlocking. 

May is drenched from the rain and carrying bags of takeout. “Hey,” she says. “I got dhal curry.”

“Thank God,” MJ closes her computer and lunges to take the bags for May so she can strip off her wet coat. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

It’s mostly because she’s been vomiting up almost every meal. 

The mere _sight_ of anything sweet makes her sick. Wednesday morning was proof of that. Harley had whipped up an entire cake for her (and also for himself, since he’s been stress baking lately), and plopped her down at the kitchen table because she’d been so busy she’d forgotten all about food, which: ‘is simply put, fuckin’ unacceptable Jones, you’re eating for two now’—and she’d promptly thrown up bile in the sink. 

One _whiff_ of anything remotely pungent makes her empty her stomach. 

It totally sucks. The first pregnancy had _not_ been this bad. 

But spicy stuff is fine. Spicy stuff is _great._ This baby would happily have her burn her esophagus by downing an entire can of jalapenos and MJ lives in fear of the day she’s finally desperate enough to try it. 

May kicks off her keds and sits down at the table while MJ divides the food. She looks exhausted, which is pretty much how all of them have these past couple of weeks. No sleep, perpetual anxiety, a latent anger that comes and goes.

“So how was work?”

May sighs. “Tiring. But we delivered two babies without any complications, so that’s good.”

MJ knows May tells her these things as an assurance that _her_ own delivery will be fine when the day comes. MJ kind of doubts that though, what with the pregnancy being pretty shitty so far. Still it’s a nice gesture. 

Abruptly she asks, “Do you really poop on the table?”

May laughs. “Some women do, yeah.”

“Okay.” MJ nods. “How will I know when to push?”

“Most women can kind of gauge it on their own,” May says, “but the doctor will tell you if you’re off-rhythm. Sometimes you feel like you need to but you really shouldn’t because it’s not a real contraction.”

MJ bites her lip. Finally she musters up the courage to ask her stupidest question: “Does it hurt?” 

May smiles softly and reaches out to tuck one of MJ’s curls behind her ear. It feels nice. It’s something her own mother never did for her. May says, “Yeah, it hurts. It’s messy, too. But there are painkillers to help with all of that, and I’m gonna be right next to you the whole time.”

MJ is quiet for a minute. It’s good that May will be there. She _wants_ May there. 

But she also wants Peter there. No matter how pissed off she might be, this is his kid too. With every day that passes and he doesn’t come home, MJ gets more and more anxious that he just never will. 

But May’s been here, steady and solid and full of answers to questions MJ didn’t even know she had. MJ’s been staying here for two weeks now because being at home had just gotten to be too much; she couldn’t listen to Indiana whining by the door anymore, or see Peter’s things all over the place and not know what the hell to do with them. 

Instead she’d completely removed herself from the situation and yeah, it’s not exactly a permanent solution, but it’ll give her time to think. 

And to wait. 

And hope like a complete idiot.

“MJ?”

“Sorry, I just—” her stomach turns abruptly and her mouth twists. MJ lunges for the sink and throws up what little she’d eaten, and then quickly rinses it down. She’s gotten good at that. 

“Oh, honey,” May comes over and gathers her hair and as soon as she’s close again, MJ’s retching. “Is it the food?”

“No,” MJ spits, “I think it might be your perfume.”

It’s flowery and sweet and normally MJ would like it a lot, but this baby is _not_ having it. 

“Shit. I put it on after my shift because I smelled disgusting, I’m so sorry. Alright, okay, I’m gonna go shower—”

“No,” MJ shakes her head. “You don’t need to do that. This is your house. I’ll just—I’ll go eat in my room.”

“Michelle…” 

MJ is already gathering her plate and iced tea. “It’s seriously fine. I have work to do anyway. Thanks for the food.”

May doesn’t look to happy about it, but she lets MJ go. 

Peter’s room is the second-largest, and just down the hall from May’s—which used to be Pepper’s—and Morgan’s bedroom, which happens to still be furnished with a lot of her things. MJ used to stay in the guest room, and then she’d progressed to just sleeping in the same bed as Peter when she stayed over, so this is sort of her room too. 

It’s also the last place anyone ever saw him. 

MJ collapses onto the bed. It’s big—too big for just one person. She always stays on the left side though, because Peter always slept on the right. 

There’s a picture of them on his nightstand. It’s face down, but she grabs it and just stares for a minute. 

They look happy. They _were_ happy. They’re not even looking at the camera, just at each other: Pepper had thrown this little get together for New Year’s and invited her and Happy and Rhodes. Pepper had taken this picture right after midnight, just when Peter was pulling out of their kiss. 

The frame is cracked from when MJ had slammed it down a week ago. Carefully, she pulls the photograph out and grabs a book from the stack on the nightstand—War and Peace; she’d bought it for him but he probably hadn’t read it—and slides the picture inside.

Her food is getting cold. 

* * *

The gel goes on cold. MJ tries not to wince. 

Pepper squeezes her hand. “How does everything look?”

Dr. Lisa hesitates. She’s a Native American woman in her mid-fifties and always smells like cinnamon and cloves, which for some reason the baby has no problem with. MJ really likes her so at least they can agree on that. 

“What is it?” MJ asks. 

“I don’t… see anything?”

That’s not the kind of tone MJ likes to hear medical professionals use. She sits up to try and look at the monitor. “What do you mean?”

“Lie back,” Dr. Lisa says patiently, pushing her back down a little. “Let me just look a little more.” 

“What do you mean you can’t see?” Pepper asks anyway, coming around to hover over her shoulder. “Like the monitor isn’t working or—?”

“No,” Dr. Lisa says. 

MJ frowns. “Like I lost it? Because I didn’t lose it. Or are you trying to say I was never pregnant in the first place because—I mean, I saw that shit on Glee and—”

“No,” Dr. Lisa says again. “This—I’m so sorry, I’m gonna be candid with you: I… I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

She turns the monitor so MJ can see and… 

There’s no baby. There’s an interruption in the grey—a nebulous black form kind of shaped like a lima bean—but no defining features of any kind. 

“What the fuck? What the fuck—”

“Don’t freak out,” Dr. Lisa says. “Listen: you’re pregnant. We’ve tested your blood and everything looked normal, okay? This is just… a hiccup. We’re gonna try a different set of equipment and see if we can figure this out.”

MJ nods, but her throat is burning and her heart is pounding and _what the fuck._

Dr. Lisa leaves. MJ stares at a horrified Pepper. “I don’t understand…?”

“Everything is okay,” Pepper says quickly, coming over to sit next to MJ on the table. “It’s probably just like she said: a mix up with the tech or something. Everything’s gonna be fine.” 

And MJ has kind of pushed this baby to the back burner. Thinking about it makes her spiral and freak the hell out because _what the hell,_ Peter is gone and she’s having their kid and what if he’s dead or maybe he’s just fucked off forever—but now? Now she’s afraid. She’s really, really scared. 

But she takes a deep breath and nods. 

“Bad tech,” she repeats. “Yeah.”

* * *

Tony strips off the latex gloves. “It probably has to do with the, uh, issues we discussed.”

MJ sits up and wipes her stomach off. “So… what the fuck do we do? There’s—I mean, is there a way to tell if it’s okay or if it’s even _alive—_?”

“Don’t freak out,” Tony says, putting both of his hands on her shoulders. 

“How can I not freak out?! I’ve tried three machines—one of which was literally designed by _Helen Cho_ and _made by you—_ and no one can find my baby! But I’m throwing up and I haven’t had a period in two months and I’m _pregnant—_ ”

“Yes, I know, I’ve seen the blood work—”

“But you don’t want me to freak out,” MJ snaps. “Yeah, sure, that’s likely.”

“Listen: if you freak out that’s gonna make me freak out, okay? So we just—we both need to take a minute and a few deep breaths so I can think.”

MJ scowls. He sits down and puts his head in his hands, massaging his temples the way Peter always does when he’s stressed and under a time crunch, like maybe he can actually coax the solution into existence.

“Let me call Cho,” he blurts. 

* * *

“It’s not ectopic,” Cho says.

“What’s ectopic?” MJ asks.

“When the baby is growing outside of the womb.” She squints and moves the wand around more. “I can see _where_ it is, I just can’t see _it._ It’s like it’s… hiding.”

MJ starts to cry. Like, she literally just bursts into tears right there on the table. She hasn’t cried like this since she was six and broke her arm when she fell off her bike, and now it’s all just pouring out of her: the breakup and this baby and Peter, God, where is _Peter?!_

“Honey,” Pepper whispers, arms around MJ now, “hey, breathe.”

“I can’t—I can’t—” she tries to but it doesn’t work and then she’s sobbing again. “Why isn’t he here? Why is this _happening?”_

“Oh, baby,” Pepper cups MJ’s cheeks and kisses her forehead. “I know this is hard, believe me. I know it feels completely _impossible._ But I am _right here_ with you and I’m not going anywhere, okay? You are _not_ alone in this.”

MJ is crying so hard that she misses the completely crestfallen look on Stark’s face. But then she feels his hands—warm and weathered—grab her own. 

He has the same eyes as Peter. 

_“Tesoro,_ ” he whispers, “I’ll fix this for you.” 

She doesn’t know if it’s a promise he can keep, but it sounds like he means it with everything he’s got, so MJ nods and lets herself be held by both of them. 

* * *

When MJ gets home that night after a bunch of other tests that had come to nothing other than the conclusion that yes, she’s definitely pregnant but no, they can’t see the baby, she takes a shower. 

She sits on the floor and lets the hot water run down her back and she puts a hand on her belly. It’s not even swelling yet. 

“I know you’re in there,” she says quietly, leaning against the wall. “I know it. I don’t… I don’t know why this is happening, but I will _not_ lose you. I fucking flat out _refuse,_ do you hear me? We’re in this shit together. It’s you and me now, got it? I might not know where Daddy is, but it doesn’t matter because I’ll love you enough for the both of us, okay? Just _stay with me.”_

MJ breathes in steam. 

She refuses to cry anymore.

* * *

1.5 MONTHS LATER 

  
  


Harley comes running when she screams.

Ariel wakes as the sound is ripped from her chest and thrashes in the dark, heart pounding, blood hot. She only stops when there are arms around her, and then she smells him: cheap cologne and toothpaste and the faintest hint of something burnt, like maybe he’s been soldering something for the last half hour. 

“Hey,” he whispers, “it’s me. You’re okay.”

He rocks her back and forth while she sobs. Ariel clings to him, tucks her face into the crook of his neck and tries to breathe. 

It’s slow going. He strokes her hair back and leans away when she’s finally got ahold of herself again. Harley smiles all crooked. “Hey, peach-a-boo.” 

It’s supposed to make her laugh and God, he’s so stupid it works. 

“What was it this time?”

_This time,_ because this crap has been happening on and off for a good two months and Ariel’s sick of it. She’s so goddamn _tired._

That’s around when she notices that they’re not alone like usual; though Charlie’s vacated the room to go sleep in MJ’s bed, Mama is standing in the doorway, still wearing her waitressing uniform under a too-big blue cardigan. 

And because she is there, Ariel can’t say what her nightmare was about. 

(Mama, it was mama: all scattered to bits again and gone forever. Then Harley too, and Cassie, and everyone else she’s ever cared a lick about.)

“Nothing,” Ariel whispers. “I don’t remember.”

Harley stares at her for a long minute, searching, and then finally nods. “Alright. You want something to eat?”

* * *

There’s a half-eaten cherry pie on the kitchen table that, if she had to guess, he and Mama were eating right off of. Ariel picks up a fork and takes a bite. It’s still a little warm. 

“Did you make this?”

“Nah, Mama brought it home from the diner,” he says. 

Mama sits across from Ariel. She studies her and then asks, “Do you remember any of them?”

“What?”

“The nightmares.” 

Ariel’s face flushes. “Not really.”

They’re a little different each time. Sometimes, for whatever reason, it’s just that day on a loop: Daddy walking up to her in the park and trying to get her to go with him so he could ‘explain’, but the minute his hand touches her skin, he crumbles to bits. 

Mama reaches out to try and comfort her but Ariel flinches away. She doesn’t even know _why._ Maybe it’s because of that stupid dream, or because she’s still not used to Mama being back. She keeps waiting for her to disappear again, keeps waiting to have to fend for herself all over again. 

Mama’s face changes—goes from sad to pinched. She stands. “I’m gonna go wash up,” she says. “Head to bed.”

Harley jerks his chin without even looking at her. “Night, Mama.”

“Night,” Ariel echoes faintly, watching her retreat up the stairs. 

Harley turns away from the dishes he’d been washing. “So…?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Ariel says. 

“Not even with me?”

Her face flushes. “I hate that.”

“Hate what?”

“That she feels like a stranger,” Ariel whispers. “I spent so long missing her and now she’s back and I… I don’t know how to be around her anymore. I forgot how to be her daughter.”

Harley sighs and plops down into the chair, all too-long legs and messy curls and flannel. She knows him like the back of her hand. She can be his sister just fine.

“You know, I think she might feel the same about bein’ a mom,” he says. 

“How do you figure that?”

He shrugs. “She doesn’t know us anymore. We’re strangers, too. Last she checked we were at each other’s throats and fighting over the TV remote all the time—”

“We _still_ fight over the remote—”

“—and now we’re like, super best friends.” Ariel snorts. He grins and nudges her ankle. “I’m serious. We did a lot of growing up, you and me. She probably feels like there’s nothing left for her to help us with, especially because we keep forgetting to go to her with our bullshit.”

Ariel sighs and sinks down in her chair. “I needed her so many times when she was gone and now she’s back and it’s like… I just don’t anymore. I mean, I _do,_ but I… figured out how to handle my shit myself, you know?”

“I know.”

They’re quiet for a minute. Ariel watches water drip from the sink faucet and feels hollow and horrible. 

“You done anything about Daddy yet?”

Her brother’s face darkens. “Don’t worry about that. Just get back to bed, okay?”

Ariel rolls her eyes. “Just let me know if you decide to go and kick his ass,” she says, rising. “I wanna watch.”

* * *

“Hello?”

How ridiculous is it that Ariel smiles at literally just the sound of her voice. “Sorry, I know it’s late.”

“It’s only nine in California,” Cassie reminds her. 

“Right.”

There’s a pause. Then Cassie asks, “Are you okay, Ari?”

Ariel bites her thumbnail. “Yeah, no. I’m good.”

“Liar.”

Ariel rolls her eyes. She leans back against the roof and closes her eyes. “When are you coming back?”

“I don’t know. I mean, my stepdad and I talked about me visiting over the summer or something, but my mom didn’t seem all that sold.”

“What? Cass, it’s been _months.”_

“I know.”

“Tony Stark could fly you out here for free at the drop of a hat,” Ariel goes on, kind of frantic. “You could take one of his private jets. If it’s the cost your Mama’s worried about—”

“It’s not the cost,” Cassie says. “It’s just me being away.”

“Tell her to come with.”

“She has a job, Ariel.”

“Tell her to quit.”

Cassie laughs. It’s the best sound in the whole world. “I’ll talk to her about it,” she says. “I promise. I wanna see you just as bad as you wanna see me, you know.”

“Impossible.”

Another pause. Then Cassie says, “I should go. I have a Geometry test tomorrow. Love you, Ari.”

Ariel closes her eyes. “Yeah. Good luck.” And then, more than Cassie could ever know, “Love you, too.”

Cassie hangs up. 

* * *

MJ’s morning sickness doesn’t get any better. 

Cho says she has hyperemesis gravidarum, which basically means MJ’s life is a complete hellscape. She was already skinny enough before, but now she’s dropped at least seven pounds because she can barely keep anything down. She had to stop taking the subway to commute to work, so now Happy drives her and pulls over whenever she feels like she has to puke. 

She can only keep unhealthy amounts of iced tea and white rice doused in sriracha down. 

Cho gives her Zofran and ginger to help with the nausea, which helps. Slowly, if she’s careful, MJ can keep whole meals down. She gains back a few pounds and can finally make it through a session without vomiting into her trash can. 

She starts to show around the end of the first trimester. 

The bump is tiny, but it’s there. She can still hide it with a baggy sweatshirt or a skirt, but she knows that won’t last forever. Pretty soon her co-workers are gonna know, and they’ll start congratulating her and asking about the due date and the father and all that other shit MJ does _not_ want to discuss with people who are basically strangers. 

One night she’s cleaning up after her last session for the day when someone knocks on the door. 

MJ, who is on the phone with May and discussing potential dinner plans, says, “I gotta go.”

“Is everything okay?”

“No, yeah, it’s good,” MJ hasn’t blinked. “Just, um—I’ll see you in a bit.”

She hangs up. 

“Hey,” says MJ’s mom. 

MJ stares. 

Sylvia shifts in the doorway, obviously uncomfortable. “I wasn’t sure if you would be here this late. Thought I might as well check, though.”

“I’m here,” MJ grits out. “What do you want?”

“I just wanted to see you,” Sylvia says. “I miss you.”

“You miss me,” MJ repeats slowly. And then, “Are you serious right now? You, the woman who basically neglected me my entire life and then didn’t believe me when I told you your husband was an abusive piece of shit, you _miss_ me? _Fuck you.”_

She turns away, going to return the coloured pencils to their drawer. 

“I deserved that,” Sylvia says. 

“Yeah you did,” MJ snaps. “You deserve that and more. Now get the fuck out of my damn office before I lose it.”

And she is: she’s about to, really. 

But Sylvia doesn’t leave. She shifts her footing anxiously like she’s thinking about it, but she doesn’t leave. 

“I wanna see Charlie.”

And that makes MJ’s blood boil. She can’t stop herself and she doesn’t try: just crosses the office and slaps her mother right across the face. It’s instinct, it’s anger. It’s stupid but she does it anyway, cruel but she doesn’t care. 

“Like hell,” MJ seethes. “You’re gonna stay the fuck away from her, do you understand me? You left her. You left us _both._ You have _no right_ to be within five _feet_ of her.”

Sylvia cradles her reddened cheek, eyes wide. 

“It should be up to her to decide,” her mother whispers after a minute.

“Yeah? You think so? Not me. I think she’s a fucking child who would do anything to please her mom because she doesn’t understand what she did _wrong.”_ MJ’s voice breaks. “She thinks you didn’t _want her._ Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true for the both of us.”

“It’s _not—_ ”

“I don’t wanna hear it!” MJ explodes. “You left! You walked! You’re _done,_ got it?!”

“It’s not your place to—”

“You made it my place when you abandoned us,” MJ says. “Now _get out.”_

Sylvia stares at her for a long moment. Then, “You know, you won’t believe me when I say it, but I love you. I really do. I wasn’t the best at showing it, but I—”

“Do _not_ fucking try to gaslight me!” MJ points to the hall. “Get _out!”_

“Michelle—”

“Now!”

Sylvia sucks in a shuddering breath and starts to leave, but before she can cross the threshold MJ calls out: “Wait.”

Hopeful, wide blue eyes. “Yeah?”

“My father,” MJ says. “Is he alive?” 

It’s not what her mother is expecting. She opens her mouth, closes it, and then makes some strangled choking sound. 

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Jersey, maybe? Last I checked, anyway. He was living with some woman and her kid.”

“Does he even know that I exist?”

Her mother looks down at her black crocodile boots and then shakes her head. “I left the day I found out I was pregnant. I um… I just wanted to raise you my way. And he wasn’t a good man. Flighty, irresponsible, bad with money—”

“Yeah, no, I don’t give a shit what you thought of him,” MJ says. “You’re like, the worst judge of character there is. Do you have a specific address? A number maybe?”

“No. But I have a name.”

A name. MJ has never even asked. She’s wondered, she’s imagined, she’s daydreamed. But to _know._

“Darnell,” Sylvia says. “Darnell Wallace.”

“Darnell,” she whispers. 

“But he was a gambler, MJ—”

“Get the fuck out.”

* * *

Indiana jumps at her when MJ comes home that night. 

MJ kneels down and wraps her arms around her dog. Indy whines pitifully, eyeing the door over her shoulder like she’s waiting for Peter to walk through it, next. 

“I know,” MJ whispers. “I miss him, too.”

She can say this to her dog. She can admit it, strangled and pathetic-sounding, into her fur where no one else will hear. 

Indy licks MJ’s cheek. MJ ruffles her fur and stands, walking deeper inside the house. The living room is dark and the kitchen is empty, though there’s another freshly baked cake cooling on the counter. 

MJ climbs the stairs to the second floor and doesn’t find her sister in the room she shares with Ariel: just darkness, two empty beds, and Ariel’s crystals casting little prisms on the wall when they shift and catch the moonlight. 

She heads up to the third floor and, feeling sick, opens her own bedroom door. 

Charlie is sitting on the bed surrounded by homework. 

“Hey,” she says. “Thought you weren’t coming by until Saturday.”

“I know,” MJ says. “I just wanted to see you.”

Charlie rolls her eyes. “You literally just texted me like two hours ago, but whatever.”

“Yeah, yeah, pretend you don’t miss me all you want,” MJ says, pulling her coat off, “you’re literally sitting on my bed.”

Her sister shrugs. “It’s the biggest one in the house and it was being wasted. Hey, how does Juliet hint that she doubts Romeo’s love for her?”

MJ pulls her earrings out. “‘Therefore pardon me, and do not impute this yielding to light love, which the dark night hath so discovered,’” she quotes, because she’s read that stupid play like a million times and knows it backward and forward and sideways to boot. “‘Dost thou love me? I know thou will say ‘ay’, and I will take thy word. Yet if thou swear’st, thou mayst prove false. At lovers perjuries, they say, Jove laughs.’”

Charlie wrinkles her freckled nose. “What does any of that even mean?”

“You’ll figure it out.”

Charlie throws her head back and groans. “I’m so tired and my brain won’t work anymore,” she whines. “Can you just do my homework for me?”

“ _No,”_ MJ says, dropping down next to her sister. It’s easier to be in this room, on this bed, when she’s not alone. “You wouldn’t learn that way.”

“I don’t _want_ to learn. This play is dumb.”

“It’s not _dumb,”_ MJ argues. “The language is beautiful—”

“The premise is boring and overdone—”

“It was _original_ for its time—”

“Yeah, well, I’ve read better fanfiction.”

MJ laughs. “Shut up. Shakespeare was a literary genius, okay? You have to pay attention to the wording.”

Charlie grunts. She opens her book back up and quotes, in a ridiculously exaggerated tone, “‘Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.’” She snorts. “Yeah, super deep.”

MJ snatches the book. “Yeah, well what about: ‘These violent delights have violent ends and in their triumph die, like fire and powder which, as they kiss, consume.’”

Charlie stares. “Is that supposed to impress me?”

“Oh my god,” MJ bemoans. “You’re literally killing me.”

Her sister laughs. She scoots down so she’s lying next to MJ. “How’s the little goblin?”

“Fine,” MJ says, hoping that’s true. The baby still hasn’t shown up on a sonogram and so all MJ can do is take prenatals and eat the right foods and hope that it’ll work out. Charlie doesn’t need to know any of that, though. 

“I can’t believe I’m gonna be an aunt,” Charlie marvels. “Do you think I’ll be good at it?”

“Why wouldn’t you be?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “I’m just not good with kids.”

“Try to hold it at least once before you decide it’s an ugly little prune, okay?”

Charlie grins. “Fine. Once. But I can’t make any promises.”

* * *

ONE MONTH LATER

  
  


Apartment 1708. 

The Caledonia. 

Harley sneaks in, timing it so he can slip right inside when someone else is leaving. He feels like a scumbag just existing in a place this expensive, which is weird because he spends every other Friday night at Tony Stark’s dinner table. 

Harley takes the elevator. 

He doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing here, except yeah, he kinda does. But it’s nerve wracking and probably stupid. 

Definitely stupid. 

Harley finds the right unit, takes a deep breath, and knocks on the door. 

It takes a few seconds for anyone to open it, and then—

Yeah, that’s his dad. It’s been so fuckin’ long he’d forgotten what the guy looked like, but he remembers now. 

There’s a baby in his arms. 

Harley looks at it. The baby drools. It has the same eyes as him. 

“So I guess those scratchers worked out, then,” Harley drawls. 

His dad pales. “ _Harley._ ”

“Yeah it’s me, you son of a bitch,” he says, and casually brushes past his dad into the apartment. It’s nice—big and spacious and finely furnished with pieces Pepper would probably dig. “I like the chandelier. Really classes the place up.”

“ _Harley,”_ his dad says again, wide eyed and wonderingly. “Oh my god, what are you doing here?”

“What am _I_ doing here? What are _you_ doing here?” Harley shakes his head. “What, you thought Ariel wouldn’t tell me? You think you can just walk up to my baby sister and I won’t hear about it?”

His dad blinks. Then he moves abruptly, carrying the baby over to the play pin in the middle of the living room. Then he wipes his sweaty palms on his khaki trousers. “God, I don’t even know what to say.”

“You can start by explaining this fuckery,” Harley snaps. “You got loaded and took off. You _left us._ Any excuses?”

“I, uh… do you want some juice?”

* * *

Harley takes a long sip. 

Squints. 

“So what the fuck?”

“Well, it’s like you said,” his dad is kinda crowded into himself, all bulky and tanned. He’s got this salt and pepper beard thing going on. “I won the lottery. Instead of blowing all of the money, though, I decided to invest.”

“And you ditched your family.”

“I… yeah. I did.”

“ _Why?”_

“I didn’t like being a father,” his dad blurts. “It’s not that I didn’t love you or Ariel, I just—I wasn’t _ready._ There was all of this pressure and I never felt like I was up to scratch and—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up. That is the absolute lamest excuse I’ve ever heard in my whole damn life. Just admit that you were a lazy coward and move the fuck on. What, are you gonna ditch that kid too when you get bored?”

He jerks his head at the baby. 

His dad shakes his head. “I didn’t get _bored,_ Harley—”

“This juice tastes like water,” Harley announces, standing up, “and you suck. I sincerely hope to never see you again in my life.”

His dad swallows. “So I guess a family dinner would be off the table?”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I could explain everything,” his dad says, earnest now. “You guys could meet your little siblings?” 

Harley stares. Then he pinches his brow. “Jesus. Fuck. Okay. What time?” 

* * *

“Faster ladies, faster! Pick up those knees!”

Miles glares. “I’m not a lady.”

“I’m working with the majority,” Steve tells him.

Miles groans and keeps running. He’s the fastest out of all of them, with Gwen as a close second. Ariel and Charlie are about the same pace, and surprisingly don’t suck in comparison to their enhanced friends. Gwen and Miles have better endurance, though, and run more laps than the other two. 

Steve sits down in the middle of the lawn and watches them run for a while longer. He checks his phone and finds a text from Sam asking when they should meet up for lunch next. Steve doesn’t reply to that. 

He hasn’t really felt like socialising lately. 

After a few more laps he blows his whistle. “Alright, go wash up. We’re done for the day.”

“But it’s only been an hour,” Charlie pants, bent over. “Barnes always makes us stay for at least two.”

Gwen nods. “And we didn’t get to practise with knives like you promised.” 

Steve sighs. “We’ll get around to it, okay? No need to overdo it just now and burn yourselves out.”

Charlie rolls her eyes. “Whatever. At least my PE grade’s gone up. I call the good shower.”

“Oh, you _bitch!”_ Gwen snaps, and they both race back toward the compound. 

Ariel follows after them at a slower pace, which leaves Steve and Miles alone. The kid stares down at him for a long moment and then says, “You look kinda miserable, man.”

“Hmm? No, I’m fine. Go on and head back.”

Instead of listening, Miles plops down in front of Steve. He drums his fingers on his knee. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

Steve can’t help smiling a little. “Parker was right about you.”

At that, Miles lights up. It’s clear that the kid misses Peter a ton. Gwen, on the other hand, seems pissed off beyond recognition. It’s an interesting contrast. 

“What did he say about me?”

“That you’ve got a good heart.”

Miles leans forward. “Anything else?”

“What, that’s not enough?”

“No, no,” Miles blinks. “I just, um… I don’t know. I still don’t get why he took off like that, and no one is telling us anything. Gwen thinks he totally dipped out, but Charlie said that he broke up with MJ before so it’s gotta be some kind of psychotic break—”

“Kid,” Steve sighs, “don’t worry about it, okay? Everything’ll work out.”

Miles frowns, but he nods after a minute. “Yeah, okay. Just, uh… if you need anything. Or anyone. To like, talk to. Let me know.”

Steve smiles. “Thanks, Morales.”

* * *

When Steve gets home, he drops his things right by the door. Mattie and Ralph jump at him. He pets them and gives them both a treat and then trudges up the stairs, hardly thinking, just feeling. 

The studio has barely been used the last couple months. In fact, Steve thinks he’s probably only been inside of it once since Bucky left. 

But now he spends a good few minutes mixing colours and tracing and staring at nothing to picture the something. 

Steve paints Bucky: armed and armoured, bound in black leather, muzzled with that mask they’d put around his maw; his arm is silver gleaming gold, reflecting the light of the fire he stands before, the fire all around him. There are embers in his hair and his eyes are burning coals, smouldering with heat and hatred. Steve feels it rolling off the canvas like a mirage, and it’s hours later when his hands finally still. He’s tense and his shirt is soaked through with sweat. He stares heavily down at the Winter Soldier swathed in ash and flame and declares it finished. 

Steve cleans his brushes in silence and closes the door to the studio behind him. 

When he comes back downstairs after a ridiculously long shower during which he spaces out and almost falls asleep, he finds Tony Stark in his kitchen.

There’s a towel thrown over his shoulder. He’s chopping garlic.

“Sam called me,” he says, in response to Steve’s exclamation of _oh, Jesus!_ “Said you hadn’t answered his texts in like, two days. Since he’s in D.C. with Rhodes right now, he asked me to come check on you. Thought I’d make dinner. How do you like spaghetti?”

Steve rubs his chest where his heart is still hammering. “I like it fine.”

“Good.”

Steve walks into the kitchen slowly. He stares at Tony. “I thought you didn’t want anything to do with me.”

“Well, that was before. Now I, uh… I don’t feel like losing anyone else. And it occurred to me as I was sitting in my office stewing over paperwork that _maybe,_ just maybe, you might be feeling as miserable and as helpless as I am.”

Steve frowns. “Your office?”

“Oh, I’m helping Pep out with SI now. Took over Peter’s half of R&D.”

Steve cracks open the fridge and pulls out some mozzarella to grate up. “How’s she been?”

“Bad,” Tony says plainly. “She doesn’t sleep anymore, she just paces around the penthouse and stress cleans. She’s organised the cupboards twice. She cries in the shower and thinks I don’t hear it.”

Steve’s stomach twists. “Jesus. I’m so sorry.”

Tony’s knife pauses. “So you haven’t reconsidered?”

“Reconsidered?”

“Telling me what you know.”

Steve drops the grater and puts his head in his hands. “Jesus, Tony.”

“What?”

“It’s not gonna do any good! It won’t change shit! You wanna know? Fine! Peter’s mother isn’t dead! She’s with them,” he says, watching Tony’s eyes widen, “and that’s _all I know._ I don’t know where they are, I don’t know if they’re okay, I don’t know where they’ll be next or how to help them!”

“You… _what?”_

“You heard what I said,” Steve mutters darkly, plopping down onto the nearest stool. “God.”

He has such a headache. He’s so tired. He misses Bucky so bad it aches, right down to his bones. 

Tony’s expression is one of abject horror. “What the hell?”

“I know.”

“She’s _alive?”_

“Yeah.”

“And he’s _with her?”_

Steve pinches his nose. “Yeah. They all left together. Told me to keep my mouth shut because they didn’t want anyone else breaking Accords, I guess.” 

Tony clutches his chest. “ _Che palle.”_

Steve lunges for him and gently helps him sit. “Are you okay? Is it your heart?”

“My heart is fine,” Tony mutters, “just completely broken, that’s all. Water?”

Steve gets him some. He sits across from Tony and puts a hand on his back, waiting for the other man to get over his shock. 

“I can’t believe it,” Tony whispers. “I don’t understand…”

And so Steve explains, as best he can, what he’d heard from Maria. Tony just listens and absorbs it all in silence. 

“God.” 

“Yeah.”

“You’re right though,” Tony admits after another small pause. “It doesn’t change anything.”

“Nope.”

“Sorry I grilled you.”

“Sorry I kept it from you,” Steve returns. “But I… I think it should probably stay between you and me. I mean, I don’t want Pepper to—”

“No, no, I completely agree,” Tony nods. “It would… it would crush her.”

“Exactly.” 

Tony drinks more water. Then he takes a deep breath. “Food’s not gonna cook itself.”

And it’s probably a testament to how much shit they’ve been through that they can just keep going. Steve turns on an old movie and they work around each other. By the time they sit down to eat it’s dark. The AC kicks on and they sit on the couch with two cold beers. Tony sheds a tear at the end of _Casablanca,_ but Steve isn’t certain it’s because of the movie. 

Then, 

“Can I ask you something I’m way too scared to ask Pepper?”

Steve raises an eyebrow. “You? Scared?”

“Shut up,” Tony kicks him. “I just… what was it like? Losing us all I mean?” 

It’s not what Steve expects. He shifts uncomfortably, brows drawn together, and tries to think. Mattie comes over like she can smell the sad on him and sniffs at his beard. Steve pets her so she knows he’s okay. 

“All I had to do was hold him.” 

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he was right there. He was ten feet away at most and I used to think… I used to think maybe if I’d just grabbed onto him… I don’t know. It was stupid.”

“It’s not stupid. I wanna know, really.”

“I’ve been around for a real long time,” he says, voice soft as he absentmindedly runs his fingers through Mattie’s fur. “I’ve lived a long life, you know? Lived through the Depression, lived through wars… but after I woke up from the ice it all just felt like a dream. It was too surreal. Nothing… nothing made sense without Buck. And then it was just me chasing after his ghost. I didn’t care what was left. Even if it was only a little piece, even if all I got was a smile or a laugh. I just needed _something_ to remember what was real, because it all starts and ends with him, Tony. He’s the only real thing I’ve ever known.” 

Steve sucks in a sharp breath and meets Tony’s eyes. “I fucking _hate it_ when he’s gone. I just feel so fucking _empty.”_

Tony stares at Steve for a long moment. Then he sighs and rests his head on the other man’s shoulder. “To our missing men,” he says, raising his beer bottle in a toast. 

Steve laughs a little. “To them.” 

They fall asleep like that.

* * *

Across town, MJ crawls into bed after a too-long bath. 

She works for a while and then sets her computer aside, too tired to concentrate on anything. Her last five emails are probably riddled with typos. 

MJ miserably flops onto her side. She finds herself unconsciously cradling the little bump, which still isn’t huge or anything, but by four months it’s _sizeable._ It’s there. 

There is an actual human baby inside of her. 

MJ chews her lip as she looks at it, and she starts thinking about all the shit this kid is gonna be born into and everything it’s already going without. By this time it can _hear her._

But it won’t hear Peter. God, it might not ever. 

Abruptly she sits up because wait a second, that’s not necessarily true. MJ grabs her phone and starts searching through her voicemail box. She scrolls all the way back and finds, to her surprise, ones as old as seven years. So much for being organised. 

MJ clicks one dated only a few months after the Snap. 

“ _Hey MJ, it’s me. Peter. Parker. Um, you knew that. Anyway, I was calling to just, like, make sure you still wanted to study together after school? Anyway, let me know. Bye.”_

And MJ can’t breathe because _holy shit,_ that’s Peter. It’s been two and a half months since she’s heard him talk and even longer since she’s heard him talk like _that._ He sounds like such a little kid. 

MJ scrolls up. 

“ _Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia!”_ Peter blurts. “ _That is a real word! It is the word for the phobia of long words! I have been practising it for four hours straight! Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia!”_ He starts to laugh. “ _I love you!”_

“ _What sits at the bottom of the sea and twitches?_ ” Peter asks in the next one. “ _Call me back to find out.”_

“ _Babuuuuushka! Babushka babushka babushka! Call me back!”_

_“Hi Emmie, it’s me. Just calling to check in and see if you’re feeling any better. I’m gonna come by in a bit with some soup and stuff, but I’m honestly willing to just blow this pop stand and come right now if you want. Anyway, I love you very very much and I’ll see you in a bit.”_

_“Hi! I’m really drunk! You’re my favourite person in the whole world! Oof—”_

“ _Why was the picture sent to jail? It was framed! Hi by the way. I’m bored. Technically I shouldn’t be bored because I have an exam in like two hours but whatever! Do you wanna meet halfway tomorrow? I’m touch starved and would like very much to give you a fucking! Kiss! On the lips. Or just a fucking. Let me know if my offer interests you.”_

“ _Hey this is super random, but I forgot to say I love you when I hung up with you and so I’m saying it now! I love you! No, like, really. I do. Okay bye.”_

_“Did you know that on the list of the World’s Cutest Things, you’re number one? It’s a scientific fact. Don’t look that up.”_

“ _Mycophagists are a thing that I learned about today. They’re mushroom hunters. I think you and me should be mycophagists together and we can live in a mushroom shaped hut and call our kid Portabella. Hunt for mushrooms with me! I love you.”_

MJ has to stop just to remember to breathe, because she’s crying, yeah, but she’s laughing too. God, it’s like her whole chest is bleeding. She’d forgotten about all the _good_ and how fucking _funny_ he was. 

Is. 

The most recent message is about six months old. MJ wipes her cheeks. She knows exactly what this one says. “Baby,” she says, putting a hand on her stomach, “that’s your daddy. Listen.” 

“ _Hi baby, it’s me. I know it’s super late, but I just… I miss you. Like, a lot. And I love you._ ” A pause. “ _I’ll be home soon.”_

She bites her lip to keep from sobbing. “He’ll be home soon, okay? I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> up next: russia!


	3. the letter

_A truth should exist,_

_it should not be used_

_like this. If I love you_

_is that a fact or a weapon?_

* * *

Bucky Barnes could write a book about shopping in farmer’s markets.

He picks his way through each stand slowly, flashing a winning smile at the old ladies behind the stalls, asking about prices in low Russian and carefully inspecting the skin of each fruit. 

If passes he’ll hand it to Peter. 

“That’s good,” he says of a plum, and so Peter adds it to the bag and Bucky pays. The woman calls him _milaya_ and pats his hand as they go. 

“Citrus,” Bucky says next, leading Peter across the cobblestone square. It’s crowded with people in the early morning and the sounds of talking and laughter echo everywhere, though Peter can’t quite discern what they’re all saying. 

Bucky taps his chin and picks up a clementine. He turns it ninety degrees, frowns, and puts it back.

_Natasha likes clementines,_ Peter almost says, and then remembers that he’s pissed at her. 

“Lemons,” he suggests, going over to them. “For cakes.”

Bucky concurs. He’s picking through the oranges and comes away with two ridiculously large ones that seem to please him immensely. He pays extra for them. 

“Farmstead cheese,” he says excitedly, nudging Peter like he’s pointing out some kind of celebrity in a crowd. Peter figures that’s actually probably accurate considering the guy grew up during the Depression. 

So he lets Bucky lead him over and they sift through wheels of cheese until Bucky finds the one that’s been aged best and feels heaviest and smells just right. 

“I love a good wheel,” he says, tucking it under his arm as they finally shuffle their way out of the market. “I’m gonna make some great fuckin’ stuff tonight. A whole feast, no more take out crap. I want a _real meal.”_

Peter just nods. He’s learned that it’s best not to interrupt Bucky when the guy gets in a frenzy like this and starts ranting about how grateful they should be for fruits and vegetables when he grew up on potatoes and boiled cabbage. Peter gets that. Also, he’s too tired to say much of anything at all these days. 

They make it back to the hostel they’re staying in, which isn’t far from Novosibirsk’s city centre. They haven’t exactly explored much seeing as they’re trying to keep a low profile; Peter’s neck is starting to hurt from how much he’s ducking his head all the time. 

The old woman behind the counter—Fekla—greets them with a grunt. They both nod back respectfully. The stairs are narrow and as he and Bucky ascend, their heavy combat boots make the floorboards creak and groan. 

The sun has reached its apex by the time they unlock the door. Inside, Natasha is curled up on the couch with a book. 

Peter’s mother is wedged in the open window and smoking.

( _Mother,_ he thinks, and it never sits right. Pepper is his mom. May is his aunt, but she’s still more of a _mother_ than this woman. Yeah, Peter knows she gave birth to him and all, and he knows that when he was little they were close, but then she left, so where the fuck does that leave them?) 

“Morning,” she says, flicking ash off the end of her cigarette and lithely climbing down. “What’d you get?”

“Brie,” Bucky says. “And a big ass wedge of Gouda. _And_ raspberries.”

Peter doesn’t think he’s ever seen the guy look so happy, which is good—Peter is glad for him—but suddenly being in this room is incredibly stifling. He can’t look at any of them. He still doesn’t even know how to _feel_ about all of this. 

Peter grabs the pack of cigarettes Mary left on the table and says, “I’m going for a walk.”

He doesn’t linger to hear them warning him about precautionary measures and disguises and whatever the fuck else. He stumbles back down the steps and earns himself another glare from Fekla. 

Seems about right. Peter salutes her. He’s pretty sure he’s due for all kinds of general disdain and karmic justice. In fact he’s kind of surprised pianos haven’t started falling from the sky to crush him like a bug. He definitely deserves it. 

Peter goes outside. The air is stale and hot and kind of hard to breathe in. The sidewalks are crowded with people, but it’s not nearly as congested as New York. 

_God,_ he misses New York. 

He leans against the outer stone wall of the hostel and presses the flame of MJ’s lighter to the end of his cigarette. 

Peter only gets in a couple of drags before, “You can’t ignore me forever, you know.”

He doesn’t look over. “I’m not ignoring you.”

Natasha hums. “You’re smoking?”

“This is a stress cigarette, it doesn’t count,” Peter says. 

It’s true. He and Pepper have a rule. 

Nat studies him. “I know this is hard for you. We left before you could even process—”

“You told me she died on a freighter inbound for London: a lie. You _made up last words for her,_ cooked up an entire alternate ending to the real story and _deliberately_ kept me in the dark. I mean, God, how long were you sitting on all that for?”

Nat shifts. “A long time. It’s the same thing I told Fury almost twenty years ago.”

That makes sense. Peter nods. Then he sits down on the ground because he’s simply too exhausted to stand. He cannot do it anymore. The legs are not working, the body is done, the brain is fried and squishy. 

He takes another pull from the cigarette and squints out at the storefronts and what little he can see of the Ob River, peeking through the gaps in buildings. The water is greenish-blue and sparkling in the sunlight. 

“Petya?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you hate me?” 

Peter frowns and looks up at her, because he’s never heard her voice sound so small and like he expects, she’s got tears in her eyes. 

“You’re my sister, Nat. I could never hate you. I just don’t know if I can ever trust you again, and that hurts more than anything because if there was _one_ person on this planet I thought I could tell everything to, it was you. Now I don’t know what’s real or what’s fake and I’m not… I’m not gonna waste my time trying to figure it out.”

She shifts, crying and not even bothering to hide it. “Well don’t worry. It’s just this little mission and then you never have to see me again.”

“So you’re just gonna disappear when things get hard? Is that what they taught you two in the programme?” 

“I think it’s more of a family thing,” she shoots back. “After all it’s what you just did to MJ, isn’t it?”

Peter can literally _feel_ his face darken. He stands. “Leave her out of this.”

“Like it’s not true?”

He sucks in a sharp breath and looks down at the ground for a second. “I’m doing what I have to do here.”

“Being a martyr won’t work on me, but hey, maybe it will with MJ. You can grovel until she takes you back and then return to your life of domestic bliss—because that was working out so well, right?”

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“It _means_ your whole relationship tanked because you’re not _built_ for that sort of thing. Neither am I and neither is Maria. You’re a soldier, Peter. If you can’t find something to fight on the ground then you’ll make your love life a warzone.” 

“Oh, fuck that.”

“What, you think I’m wrong? You think all of your problems couldn’t have been solved if you’d just communicated with her?”

“Communication? Okay, here’s some communication for you: this whole thing is bullshit. It’s not a _mission,_ Natasha, it’s a _crusade._ If you haven’t seen that yet then you’re on some serious crack. And you’re a complete hypocrite by the way. You push everyone away because you’re too afraid of losing them and then you get territorial when they find someone else to rely on. _Screw you.”_

He drops the cigarette, drags a shoe over it, and leaves her there on the corner with damp cheeks. 

* * *

They decide to go to the Siberian base first. It’s the one where Bucky used to be stored, and also where he and Steve abandoned Peter’s dad, shivering in a broken suit, basically left for dead. 

SHIELD combed over it after they came for Tony. Apparently there wasn’t much to find: just a bunch of murdered super soldiers in tanks and outdated technology from the seventies at the latest. Any valuable intel had already been pillaged. 

At least, that’s what Peter had thought. 

Then Mary leads them down a super secret passageway and reveals an entire sub-level of the bunker. It’s significantly cleaner and outfitted with new tech. The walls and floors are all white and the air smells sterile like a hospital. 

Mary goes to disable the security features while Nat slinks off to root around. 

Peter and Bucky creep through the facility with their weapons out, but it’s obviously cleared out. Peter can’t hear any heartbeats except theirs. Bucky’s is loud and kind of skipping, tripping over itself. 

He and Peter clear the nearly whole floor without encountering another soul. They come to the last room and Bucky stops dead. 

There’s a chair. 

It’s sitting innocently in the middle of what looks like an observation room, but there’s nothing really innocent about the metal bands that are meant to hold down Bucky’s wrists and the overhead piece that’s probably supposed to keep his head in place while he’s electrocuted over and over. 

Peter looks at Bucky. 

Bucky looks sick. 

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I just,” his mouth twists, “I need some air.”

Peter watches him trudge back up the stairwell they’d come down. Normally he’d just let the matter lie, but not here. Not when Barnes is literally returning to possibly the most traumatising place on Earth for him. 

So Peter follows.

He finds him in an open room overlooking the snow capped mountains. It’s freezing in here but Bucky doesn’t even shiver. He just stares out at the view, jaw clenched, eyes dark. 

That’s when Peter sees it. 

It’s lying discarded off to the side, so he ducks to grab it and turns it over in his hands. 

A faceplate. 

His _dad’s_ faceplate. 

“This is where it happened?”

Barnes nods. “Yeah.”

“Thought I recognised it, but the footage was bad and I only watched it once. Couldn’t stomach it,” Peter says, looking around. Then he runs his fingers over the slits in the mask. “It wasn’t your fault y’know. What happened, I mean.” 

“Yeah, so Steve’s always telling me.”

“He’s right. You should listen to him.”

“Probably.”

He catches Bucky’s smirk, but it’s like the flash of a knife in the dark: bright and fleeting. It falls and leaves his face stony. 

“Sometimes when I wake up I’m back here for just a minute,” he says, voice as soft as the snow outside. Then he looks at Peter with tearful eyes. “This isn’t a dream, right? This is—it’s real?”

And Peter does the only thing he can think of: he grabs Barnes’ flesh wrist so he can feel the pressure, the grip, the warmth, and he says, “It’s real. But you’re okay now.”

Barnes nods. “God, I feel like such a little kid sometimes,” he rasps. “I wasn’t made for this like Steve was, you know? He was small but he was a fighter from the start. I just dragged him around by his collar and kept him from dying when he got sick. That was… that was all I knew how to do. Save him, I mean. Over and over.”

Peter squeezes his wrist. “Being the kind of person who saves takes just as much strength as being the kind who fights. They’re not so different when you really think about it.”

Barnes takes a deep breath. “Which kind were you? Before all this shit happened I mean.”

“I…” Peter frowns. He thinks, suddenly, of that night in the rain by the Quick-N-Go; of Ben lying on the ground and the mugger running away. It had never once crossed Peter’s mind to pursue him, to just leave Ben lying there like that. “The saving kind, I guess. Still not used to all the fighting.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Personally I’d much rather use sarcasm to defeat my enemies, but that’s just me.”

Barnes snorts. “If only it were that easy.”

Peter realises he’s still holding Barnes by the wrist. He squeezes one more time and then lets go, returning his attention to the faceplate. “Dad could probably do it. I mean, if anyone could, it’d be him.”

“Can you imagine if it’d gone that way instead? Just him and Steve throwing zingers at each other until one of ’em dropped?” 

Peter grins because Barnes starts laughing at his own joke before he even finishes, and then Peter is laughing too. 

This isn’t the place for that sort of thing. It echoes off the walls of this dark, damp room. 

They’re interrupted by Mary. 

“What’s so funny?”

She’s got this smirk on her face that reminds him so much of Nat it’s like, painful. But the look in her eyes is all _him:_ hopeful and bright and kind of mischievous. There are like at least three pictures on May’s kitchen fridge of him with that very same gleam. 

He doesn’t know what to do with that information and his smile falls. 

“Nothing, all-spice,” Bucky says, and throws the revamped shield across his back. “What’d you find?”

She holds up the flash drive Peter had brought along. It’s shaped like a War Machine helmet and it looks completely ridiculous in her hand. 

“Location for the manor,” she says. “And a few other bases that Yelena might have stayed at. Plus some Winter Soldier stuff.”

Bucky’s face darkens. “Like what?” 

She hesitates. “There were some encrypted files. Nat grabbed them.”

“That’s all?”

Mary’s eyes flit to him and something in her face lightens like it always seems to when she sees him. She tosses him the flash drive and he catches it without even looking. “You can look for yourself later.”

Then she turns around. “Come on, we don’t have all day.”

* * *

That night they wind up in a motel a few kilometres outside of Kolpashevo. 

Mary’s been watching him. 

It’s not every day that a person reunites with their long lost kid. She’s spent a long time imagining him—the habits he might get from her, the kind of person he might be, all that stuff. 

But he’s not anything like what her brain cooked up. 

He’s… exhausted. He’s got all of these jagged edges and broken pieces. He walks like he’s been carrying the sky on his back all day and knows he’s gonna have to do it again tomorrow. 

His voice is even and measured, but he can be dry like her and sarcastic as hell—probably Stark’s influence—but underneath all that he’s… 

_Sweet._

She can feel it, really feel it, like she’s never felt it on anyone else before. Over the years her powers have developed significantly and these days, just looking at a person tells her all she needs to know. She can feel the emotions radiating right off of them and their thoughts can be _so loud_ sometimes. 

But not him. His mind is closed to her but his heart is wide open and _bleeding_ all over the metaphorical floor. 

The damn thing is broken and she wonders what did it. She sits on counters and in corners and on chairs, wondering about it. Sometimes in the middle of the night she can feel the quiet throb of his anguish seeping through the walls. It smacks against her psyche like an ocean wave and wakes her right up, and she lies there for a while doing her best to project peace and calm right back. 

He doesn’t realise she’s doing it. Either that or he just doesn’t say anything. 

When he looks at Nat, it’s anger: hot like the lick of a whip in the pit of his stomach. Then comes pain. Being around Nat, for him, is like having a bruise that someone is constantly pressing. 

His mind is always racing and she can hear the hum of it like an AC unit, but she can’t make out the thoughts like she can for some. Others, like Nat and Bucky, are also pretty good at keeping themselves closed off. They don’t have any natural talent or affinity for it, but they’re good at making sure their heads are clear. 

Peter is keeping her out deliberately. She doesn’t think he even knows what he’s doing. 

And the terrifying part about that is, if he can actively freeze her out, what _else_ can he do? What other gifts does he have lying dormant that he hasn’t tapped into yet? 

She’d been wrong thinking he didn’t have her abilities just because they’d never cropped up when he was a kid. They’re there, but they’re weak and watered down. He’ll never have to worry about _control_ or _rage._ He’ll never dream about a place and accidentally wake up in it, or shatter glass in his fear. 

But the sweetness. She can’t get over that. She’d felt it when she’d visited him in the in-between (and really, that’d been more like him calling her: a tug in the pit of her stomach that had caused her to black out and the next thing she knew she was with him). 

He’s different now. It’s barely been a year since that day, but he’s angry and bitter like he wasn’t before. 

Underneath it all though, she can feel something like sunshine. It’s been there for as long as she can remember. She’d sensed it when he was just a little baby, and now it pulsates off him like his soul is its own star or something. 

Mary finds him by the pool. He’s got his pants rolled up and his legs in the water and he sips from a bottle of vodka by the mouth, staring forlornly at the rippling light on the walls. 

Mary works up her courage and approaches. “Can I sit?”

He shrugs. Takes another pull. 

Mary settles on the ground. “Do you drink a lot?”

Peter kind of freezes like the thought had never really occurred to him before and then slowly lowers the bottle. He looks at her with furrowed brows. “Are you asking if I’m an alcoholic?”

Mary bites her cheek. “Your dad was. Means you’ve got a propensity for it.”

“And how do you know he was an alcoholic?”

“I read the tabloids.”

He stares and then starts to grin. “Did you now?”

“Well I wasn’t _always_ with HYDRA.”

He nods and sets the bottle aside. “I don’t get drunk like everyone else. It takes a lot and it never lasts a long time. Even if I _was,_ it wouldn’t really do anything to me. No liver damage, no memory loss. All that stuff pretty much fixes itself overnight.”

“Must be nice.”

“Oh, it is,” he says, and it makes her laugh a little. She can’t help it. 

He looks at her again and squints, and he’s got those eyes that she loves so much. “Were you looking for me or were you looking for him?”

“At the tabloids?”

“Yeah.”

“Both of you,” she answers honestly. “Believe it or not, I liked the guy. Didn’t know him very well, but I liked him. I wanted to see if you’d find your way back to each other at some point. I mean, Ben knew, so I thought maybe one day he’d cave and—”

“Wait wait wait, back up,” his face scrunches up, “Ben _knew?”_

“Oh,” Mary says, realising he probably hadn’t been aware of that. “Yeah, he did.”

He stares. 

“Bullshit.”

Mary rolls her eyes and instead of wasting time trying to convince him she’s telling the truth, she just grabs him by his forearm and _shows_ him: her and Ben in the dugout while Peter was clumsily pitching on the field, Ben confronting her about Richard and Mary subsequently freaking the fuck out until Ben had promised he wouldn’t tell. 

Peter rips away and the connection severs. He sits there for a second, stunned, and then drops right into the pool. He splashes his face, rubs his eyes, blinks them, and then says, “ _What?”_

And Mary just starts laughing. 

She can’t help it. She laughs so hard she gets a stitch in her side and he sputters. “This is so not funny,” he says, looking kind of offended. “You can’t just brush this off—”

“I’m sorry, I’m not,” she takes a deep breath. “Did you know the last time I ever saw you, you were shoving cookie dough up your nose and—” she gasps a little, “you’re still just as fuckin’ weird.”

He starts to laugh right back. “I _what?!”_ he covers his face with his hands when it starts to get red from how much they’re both busting up. 

“Your first word was ‘quack’,” she manages to wheeze out, and Peter bursts into a fresh round of maniacal laughter. Mary’s on her side now and wiping tears away, sucking in deep, sharp breaths. “You had this little rubber duck and you’d pop his whole head in your mouth and then spit him at me.”

He puts his hands on his hips and god, he looks so ridiculous. This _kid,_ holy shit. She can’t believe she was afraid to walk up to him ten minutes ago. He’s still just as much of a crackhead as he was when he was little. 

“Okay,” he says, coming up to rest his arms on the cement where she lays, “I’ll bite: what was his name?”

“Hoo.” 

“Hoo,” Peter repeats, grinning. Then he rests his mouth on his folded up arms like he wants to hide it. 

“I think you meant to say ‘Hugh’,” she tells him, and he snorts. 

Mary reaches out and touches the darkened area of his skin where the hourglass tattoo is. He flinches a little but lets her trace it, once and twice and three times. 

“For Nat?”

He hums. 

“She’s always been kind of hard to pin down,” Mary whispers. “When we were little she was wild. Used to sneak out and come sleep in my bed with me when she was lonely, but I thought she had some sort of superpower because she’d always pop up when _I_ was feeling scared.”

Peter stares. “She has a habit of doing that. Popping up, I mean. She’s like an emo whack-a-mole.”

Mary laughs again. She can’t remember the last time her cheeks hurt from smiling, but they are now and it feels good. 

Then she says, “I left her like I left you. I think it really messed her up.”

Peter frowns. “Why do you think you do that? Leave, I mean.”

Mary’s lip twitches. “If I had to psychoanalyse myself, I’d say it probably had something to do with Babushka selling me off to the KGB at five years old like I was some kind of prized horse she’d rather have seen shot between the eyes. Sort of made it hard to believe anyone really wanted me around.”

Peter nods slowly. “Makes sense I guess.”

“Yeah.” She gives the centre of his tattoo a tap and then lets go, moving to lift her shirt sleeve up to the elbow. 

Peter stares. “That’s my birthday,” he says, stunned. “That’s my birthday _on your arm.”_

“I didn’t want to forget,” Mary whispers. “They made me forget you so many times and I kept—I kept remembering and running away. This was to help with that.” 

He reaches out and, with wet hands, traces the numbers on her skin. It’s the first time he’s initiated any contact. 

“I would’ve used comic sans, personally.”

Mary grins. “That’s ’cuz you’re a fucking goblin.”

Peter laughs with pure delight and Mary _loves_ that sound. She always has. It’s ridiculous: all she wants to do is hold him and he’s _right here,_ for the first time in years he’s actually in front of her, but she can’t do it. 

He’s frowning. 

“What?” 

“I just, uh… I don’t know what’s real with you and what’s not, you know?”

Mary stares at him. “Everything,” she says. “Everything is real with you.” 

Peter stares back. Then, “I should probably get outta this pool, huh?”

“Probably.”

She moves so he can climb out, which is something he does with ease even though he’s sopping wet. His Converse squeak against the ground. “Awesome,” he says. “Bucky’s gonna kill me for soaking the carpet.”

“At least it’s water and not blood.”

His head shoots up. “Has that happened to you?”

Mary gives him a look. “ _Everything_ has happened to me.” 

“Okay,” he nods, and wrings out the end of his shirt. “Yeah, makes sense. Very cool.” 

Her lip twitches again. “I should probably get to my room before Nat sends out a search party or something.” 

“I bet she already has.” 

Mary lets herself grin and starts to walk away until he calls after her. She stops and turns back around. “Yeah?” 

“For the record, I wanted you around,” he says, and then pauses. “ _Want_ you around. Goodnight, Mary.”

And Mary, eyes burning, says, “Goodnight,” right back. 

* * *

The manor is tucked away in the woods somewhere between Abaza and Abakan. 

The grounds are unkept and overgrown. The windows of the house itself are all busted and broken in and boarded shut. One of the front doors, black paint chipped, is hanging on one hinge. 

There are bullet casings everywhere and holes in the walls. Barnes takes the lead and Peter brings up the rear; slowly they make their way inside, clearing each room as they go, skirting carefully around corners and never letting their guard down until all four of them are satisfied that it’s actually deserted. 

Nat walks across the scuffed marble floors that Madame B had tried so hard to keep polished at all times. She runs her hand over the dining table and fingers the little mark she’d made when she’d buried her knife into it that one time. 

All of the chairs are gone, and the paintings, too. Without Madame B’s curation of statues and pottery and floral arrangements, the place feels cold. 

Hell, it always had anyway. 

Maria finds her in one of the dance studios, staring at the wall that used to be covered in mirrored panelling. It now lies in shards on the ground. 

Maria rests her chin on Nat’s shoulder. “Remember Melina?”

“Don’t remind me.”

Her sister grins. She kicks off her worn down boots and moves to first position, raising her arms delicately over her head. “I bet I could still beat her at dance even with my damn knee,” she says, and neatly pirouettes. 

Nat watches with amusement. “Tell me about Richard.”

Her sister stumbles a little. Her face hardens. “Why?”

Nat shrugs. “I just don’t understand why you kept me in the dark.” 

“Well it’s not exactly like you were around anyway,” Mary retorts, “and besides, it… it was like oil and water. You didn’t mix.”

“You think he wouldn’t have liked me?”

“I _think_ I wanted to keep you apart,” Maria replies cleanly. “I wanted to keep the past in the past. Richard and Peter were my future. They brought out the good in me.”

“And I bring out the bad?”

“No,” Maria says. “You bring out the good too. But you _reminded_ me of the bad.”

Nat hums. “I can feel the love.”

Her sister pauses, smiles, and says, “I love you.”

And _fuck,_ that’s where Peter gets the doe-eyed charm. Nat could laugh if she didn’t already feel like crying. 

“I lied for you,” she whispers, “and ruined my relationships with Peter _and_ Steve. They trusted me and now they don’t, and I don’t know if they ever will again.”

Maria hops into position two. “Trust is a finicky thing. It comes and goes.”

“That’s it? That’s all you have to say? I’m jeopardizing my entire career and standing with Fury and sabotaging my relationship with my best friends and _that’s_ your response?”

She moves without even thinking about it, following the momentum of her rage. Nat tries to sweep Maria’s legs out from under her, but her sister sees it coming and jumps with the motion. Then she grabs the elbow Nat had planned on using against her sister’s throat, hooks their arms together, and yanks them both down. 

Nat lands on her face. Her chin smacks against the ground. Maria climbs onto her back and gets Nat’s arm behind her head.

It’s all over in less than five seconds. 

Her sister pants. “I told you I was still better than you.”

Nat grunts and squirms. “Let go.”

“Not until you say sorry.”

“Eat a bag of dicks, Maria.”

Maria shoves the back of her head into the floor and buries her knee into the base of Nat’s spine. “That was rude and uncalled for. You’re being childish.”

“You’re not my _mother.”_

“I know I’m not your fuckin’ mother, but you’re being a little _bitch.”_

“Screw you,” Nat snaps, and pushes up with all of her strength, twisting around mid-movement, reaching up for a fistful of hair so she can bang their foreheads together.

But Maria latches on and they just stay like that, breathing hard. 

“You did me a favour and I’m grateful. I’m not trying to ruin your life, Natalia, but I can’t fix it for you, either.” 

Nat sucks in a sharp breath and lets go. Maria’s spine straightens but she doesn’t move except to cup Nat’s cheeks. 

_“Mladshaya sestra,”_ she says, and kisses her forehead. “Everything is gonna be okay.”

And Nat just melts because Maria’s always had this way about her, this quiet kind of reassurance. It’s in the way she speaks and the way she walks and the way she moves, a gentle confidence that soothes Nat’s frayed nerves. She believes it. 

Everything will be okay. 

Someone clears their throat. Maria and Nat’s heads whip around. 

Barnes and Peter stand in the doorway to the studio, wide-eyed. 

“The hell,” Peter deadpans. 

Nat glares. “Did you find anything?”

“Uh, yeah,” he lifts a little metal object. “Shiny key.” 

* * *

The key doesn’t unlock the room in the back of the manor, but that’s okay because Barnes just kicks the door in. It falls with a dusty _thunk._

They creep inside. 

It’s clearly an office, but there are only a few books left on the shelves—probably like, Russian encyclopaedias or something—and there are papers scattered all over the floor. Peter picks one up and squints at the characters, but can’t quite figure them out. 

Barnes leans over his shoulder. “Cryllic,” he grunts. 

“Bingo!” Nat says suddenly. She’s kneeling in front of the desk drawers, one of which she just unlocked, and flicking through the files. “ _Vostokoff, Petrov—_ you want this, Maria? Kind of useless since we’ve both already read it. I’m still bummed I could never find mine in here.”

Intrigued by that, Peter lowers himself to the floor and starts knocking on the wood. When he gets about four inches from the ground, the sound hollows out. 

“False bottom,” he says. 

“Shady bitch,” Nat mutters. 

“Excuse me?”

“Not _you,”_ Nat snaps. She then pulls out the drawer itself and her eyes widen. “It’s mine!” 

“ _Just_ yours?” Mary asks, peering inside the little alcove. 

“ _Da. Romanov,_ _Natalia._ ” She flicks it open, scans the first page, and promptly drops it. “ _What.”_

Peter snatches it up and as he reads, his eyes widen. “What the fuck,” he breathes. “You’re Anastasia Romanov’s _daughter?_ You were born in _1928?!”_

“Wait, _what?”_ Mary takes it. “What are you talking about?” 

“Holy shit.” Peter is still reeling. “You’re only ten years younger than Bucky.”

Nat’s face drains of all colour. “You take that _back._ ”

“What? _Facts?”_

“‘Natalia Alianova Romanov, born to the Great Duchess Anastasia Romanov in the year of 1928, was taken into the custody of… Ivan Petrovich…’” Mary looks up. “Give me my file.”

Bucky wordlessly passes it over. 

“Ivan Petrov,” Mary breathes, “son of Ivan Petrovich. Holy fuck, my great-grandfather brought you here. _Natalia.”_

Mary jostles Nat’s shoulder. Nat blinks. “I’m… an Empress?” 

Peter bursts into laughter. He makes grabby hands for Nat’s file and keeps reading it. “Oh wow,” he says after a minute, “so your mom chucked you out of a window while the Nazis were burning your house down and Ivan brought you here?” 

“That must have been how Babushka knew to send _me,”_ Mary marvels. “Because they’d done it before.”

“This isn’t possible,” Nat breathes. 

“You’re the last living descendent of the Royal Romanov family,” Peter proclaims, too delighted to be angry. “Wow, this is so cool. They kept you in hiding until you were three and then put you in cryo for _fifty-two years.”_ He looks up with a wide grin. “You’re almost a fuckin’ hundred!”

“And all the shit you give me,” Barnes grumbles, hardly even paying attention because he’s too busy sorting through actually relevant paperwork. “Calling me a fossil, telling me to apply for senior discounts. Karma’s a real bitch, Romanov.”

“Hey, that’s Your Majesty to you, Barnes,” Peter says happily. 

Nat promptly whacks him upside the head. “This isn’t funny!”

“Of course it is! You’re fucking loaded! You’re the _rightful monarch of Russia.”_

He starts to laugh and Nat covers her face with her hands. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“Is that a royal decree?”

“Oh my god!” she explodes, and shoots to her feet. “Enough!”

“Is it though? Because I don’t think I’m ever gonna be over this. In fact I’m pretty sure you’ll still be able to hear me laughing about it when I’m a skeleton in my coffin.”

“You’ll be one sooner than you think if you don’t shut the hell up, _Petya.”_

“What, are you gonna kill the great-great-great grandson of your first ever bodyguard, Ivan the OG?” 

Natasha rakes a hand through her hair and then sits down heavily on the desk. “Shit,” she says, and puts her head in her hands. 

Mary gathers up both of their files. “Take a deep breath, _sestra.”_

“Take a deep breath? I’m _ninety-six!”_

Peter and Bucky look up at each other and burst into a fresh round of laughter. 

* * *

Nat is still reeling hours later, sitting up in bed with her hair damp and curling from the shower she’d taken to try and clear her head.

There are papers all around her—photographs and letters and documents with her name on them. Not knowing what the hell to make of any of this, she views it with as much detachment as she can muster. 

But there is a wrinkled, weathered black and white picture of Anastasia Romanov holding a baby ( _Natalia,_ that’s _Natalia_ ) and she can’t help staring at that one for a while, gently trying to finger out the creases. 

A knock on the door gets her heart pounding. Nat’s head shoots up. “Yeah?”

Maria ducks her head in. “Can’t sleep?”

Nat opens her mouth and then closes it again. Wordlessly, she starts gathering up all of the intel she’s spent her entire life wondering about, shoves it back in the brown folder from whence it came, and allows Maria to shut the door behind her and scramble under the covers. 

Nat flicks the light out. 

They stare at one another in the dark. 

“So what do you think?”

“About?”

“All of it, I guess.”

Maria’s lip quirks up. “Those were Soviet slugs on the ground outside,” she says after a minute of thought. “I think Yelena shot the place up.”

“So you think we’re on the right track?”

“I _think,”_ Maria says, rolling onto her back, “we need to retrace her steps, search the cell she was dispatched to after the Red Room. There should be more information there.”

“And what about the serum? We didn’t find any in the manor.”

“We will,” Maria says quietly. “Wherever Yelena is, that’s where it’ll be. They’re using her. They need her strong.”

Nat absorbs that in silence. Then she reaches for her sister and wraps her arms around Maria’s torso. “I’m sorry I tried to kick your ass today.”

To her surprise, Maria laughs. Her fingers run through Nat’s hair. “That’s okay.”

But it’s not. Maybe it’s paranoia or anxiety or something, but Nat is pretty sure her own scrapes and bruises have been taking longer to heal. They ache more and feel deeper. She can’t even imagine what it’s like for Maria. 

“I’m still sorry.”

Maria doesn’t say anything else, just kisses Nat’s forehead like she always has, and hopefully always will. Nat doesn’t feel like a soldier in her arms or a soviet assassin or an empress. She just feels like a broken little kid. 

She holds her tighter and falls asleep.

* * *

A WEEK LATER

Peter and Bucky are in the middle of making dinner when Nat says something really terrible. 

“We’re out of vodka.”

All of them freeze, including Mary, who’s been playing a game of solitaire at the kitchen table for the last ten minutes. Peter slowly sets down a tomato. “Oh?”

“So? It’s not like we need it—” Bucky starts to say, but shuts up at the looks they all give him. “ _Oy gevalt.”_

“I’ll go,” Peter blurts. 

He doesn’t actually want to, but it gives him an opportunity to do the Thing again—the thing where he finds the nearest payphone, dials up MJ’s number, and has heart palpitations when he gets her voicemail box because he actually gets to listen to her _speak._

It’s a little like how he imagines snorting crack must make a person feel. He’s got the whole thing memorised now: _Hi, this is Michelle Jones, leave me a message after the beep._

Fucking beautiful. Absolutely profound. 

God, he misses her so much he thinks his heart is actually gonna eat itself or something. 

He can’t stop thinking about her. It’s actually getting kind of ridiculous at this point. He’s dreaming about her and waking up expecting to smell her shampoo and it’s absolutely _crushing_ when there’s nothing but empty bed. 

He’s putting his jacket on, stomach literally _aching,_ when Mary says, “I’ll come with.”

Peter opens his mouth to argue, but then he looks her up and down and she’s kind of vibrating a little, the same way he’s vibrating to get to the pre-recorded sound of MJ’s voice, and his shoulders sag. 

Not tonight, then. 

“Yeah okay, come on.”

* * *

There’s a festival going on.

The streets are crowded with people which conveniently helps them blend in. There’s music and lights and it would all be really cool if Peter weren’t tense twenty-four seven and always looking for a threat. 

This… does not help with that. 

Mary keeps a good seven inches of space between them at all times. Their shoulders do not touch. Their eyes don’t catch. 

Then, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Uh, shoot.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

He stops walking and has to look at the ground for a second just to collect himself. “I, uh—yeah. Still am, actually. Why do you ask?”

She shrugs. “Just curious. I can kind of feel it around you sometimes under all the sadness.”

His eyes narrow. “Feel it? What do you mean?”

“It’s the same way I read minds or teleport. It’s like I can… feel what you feel. Like empathy on steroids.”

He gets a head rush just thinking about what that must be like. “And you can do that with everyone?”

“No,” Mary says. “Not well, anyway. Some people are closed off. Some people are just complete sociopaths. But I feel a stronger connection to you than I ever have with anyone else.”

His brow furrows. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know,” she says mildly, and grabs for his hand, “but the same blood that flows through my veins flows through yours, too.” 

Mary taps his pulse point and traces the lines on his wrist. 

“You miss her?”

“More than anything,” he replies automatically. 

She purses her lips. “I’m sorry I dragged you away from your family.”

“What, are you kidding me? This couldn’t have come at a better time.” He grins as she laughs. “Besides, you’re my family too.”

That catches her off guard, and him too, kind of. But it’s true, isn’t it? Despite the fact that she’s done some seriously screwed up shit, they’re still the same. In fact they’re so similar it’s eerie sometimes. He’s constantly catching himself making the same facial expressions as her and he’s realised over the course of the last month that they both do that thing where they scratch their eyebrow with their middle finger. 

“Vodka?” 

She starts. “Right.”

* * *

They find a corner store full of alcohol and get a few bottles and a box of chocolates. Peter thanks the guy in Russian and they walk back out into the night. The air is cold and sharp like it’s gonna snow soon. 

“What is he like?” 

“Hmm?”

“Tony.” 

“Oh,” Peter says, and then he smiles because he just can’t help it. “He’s… really funny, for starters. Like, if I’m having a bad day he can just smell it on me and he knows exactly what to say to make me laugh. And he’s fussy, too. He’d never admit it but he is. He cares like, an astronomical amount. I really think he would steal the entire moon out of the sky if I asked him to. God, what a guy.”

Mary’s face is soft. “I’m glad.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Her lips purse. “I just… I know you don’t really remember him, but Richard was… he was your father, you know? And he was _crazy_ about you. I mean, he loved me, but he _loved_ you.” Her eyes start to well up. “He used to read to you every single night—and I mean _every night_ without fail, and if you ever had a bad dream he would—you know how most parents stick around long enough for the kid to fall asleep and then leave? Yeah, that wasn’t his style. He stayed the whole night through, just in case you woke up again and got scared. And he baked every single one of your birthday cakes and taught you all of the names of every constellation and… God, it would have crushed him. It really would have broken his heart if he’d known.” 

She’s saying it like she’s reminding herself of this fact, reiterating it for the thousandth time so she knows she made the right choice. Peter stares for a long minute. Then, “I’m sorry. I wish I remembered all of that.”

“I could show you?” Mary asks, suddenly hopeful. 

Peter starts to say _yes,_ and then he stops. 

He stops because he already has a dad. He doesn’t know Richard and all of that sounds great, it really does, but _Tony._ Tony would have done all that, too. Peter knows it in his bones. Hell, _Ben_ did all of that stuff and more. For some reason it just doesn’t feel right to think about Richard the same way he thinks about them. And besides, it’s already hard enough having more than one mom. 

“Maybe some other time,” he says softly. 

Mary nods slowly. They keep walking for a while. The festival is winding down, so the bridge they’re crossing when she stops him is empty aside from them. 

“I need you to know that I never _wanted_ to be away from you, okay? I would have found a way to have stayed or taken you with me if I could have, or created new identities for us both—but it wasn’t just HYDRA I was trying to keep from you, it was… it was me. I never wanted to hurt you. I just wanted you to be _safe_ and I’m so, _so_ sorry.”

Peter studies her for a moment: considering, weighing his options. 

Then his hand, palm up and open, stretches into the space between them.

Maria stares. Then she switches the bottle of vodka so that it’s tucked under her other arm and takes it with a broken, tentative kind of smile. 

“I know,” he says, and they walk the rest of the way in easy silence.

* * *

Early the next morning finds Peter on the terrace, elbows on his knees as he reads the letter he’s long memorised one last time. 

Then he flicks his lighter to life and watches the pages blacken and burn. 

* * *

It happens on accident. Them becoming a family of their own, that is. 

Natasha starts baking and once she starts, she can’t stop. She stays up late into the night crafting macaroons and little lemon cakes that she and Maria sit on the counter to eat. 

They drink from the same liquor bottle, passing it around the table and taking pulls by the mouth over yet another round of crazy eights. 

They argue over the TV when they have one. They smoke too much. Peter and Bucky make breakfast together every morning no matter what—though sometimes it only consists of water bottles and granola bars and not much else. 

They wear matching Kevlar outfits and lose track of whose gun belongs to who and start talking in exclusively Russian for seemingly no reason at all. 

It’s chaotic. Sometimes Bucky has nightmares and Peter sits outside with him until the other man decides he can sleep again. Occasionally Bucky will talk about whatever it is he dreamed, but most of the time it’s just him, Peter, the night sky, and the glowing orange embers of Bucky’s cigarette. 

Peter and Nat still aren’t talking, but for some reason there’s less tension than there used to be. It’s kind of become a game at this point: who can piss the other one off quicker? Who can be the pettiest? One time Peter orders take-out and deliberately gets all of her least favourite dishes. Nat starts trying to trip him in hallways and, when that doesn’t work, she sticks stupid notes to his back that say things like ‘kick me’—or worse, ‘hug me’. Bucky always does both. 

They search. They raid old bases and rifle through filing cabinets and Peter stays up late into the night searching through SHEILD’s database (which he hacked for funsies) looking for other clues from confiscated evidence.

Most of these bases SHIELD’s never even found yet, though, and they’ve still been cleared out like a Walmart on Black Friday. Which _means_ someone on HYDRA’s inside did it and moved all the crap to a new location. 

They burn down the facilities they leave. Peter thinks it might be one of the main reasons they’re doing this at all: so Mary and Bucky can desecrate all the places that haunt them in the night; so they can make it all a little less real. 

Peter, for his part, settles into the routine. Search, scavenge, destroy. Over and over and over again, week after week. It gets to the point where he loses track of the days, where time starts slipping through his fingers like sand. 

He feels sort of like he’s floated out of his own body and he’s just looking down on himself _be._ His mouth moves and words come out, but is it really him speaking? His heart beats and pumps blood, but is it really bleeding? 

He doesn’t know anymore. 

He just knows he wakes up at precisely four in the morning most nights and stares at his ceiling for a while, out of breath and covered in sweat. The dreams are all different: sometimes it’s Morgan crying out in pain, sometimes it’s Tony crumbling in his arms all over again; other times it’s just blackness and the agonising, all-encompassing pain that wearing the gauntlet had brought—and in the background, over and over, the sound of MJ shutting their front door on him. 

Those dreams have him waking up with wet cheeks too, and he knows he sometimes wakes Bucky when he ducks into the bathroom to splash his face, but Bucky never says anything about it. 

Once, when Peter vomits into the toilet in the wake of a real doozy, Bucky comes to sit next to him on the cold tile of the motel’s bathroom floor. 

Peter starts crying and he doesn’t stop even when Bucky pulls Peter close and starts shushing him, muttering poems in Russian. 

They’re only surviving, really, but it’s still better than the alternative.

* * *

“You still write on them.”

Mary had made this observation a while ago, but she only confronts James about it a few weeks into the mission. They’re due for another raid tomorrow at a bunker not far from Kiev. 

James is on the roof of the hotel they’re staying in, alone and frowning as always. 

But his lip quirks up at the sound of her voice and Mary still isn’t used to it. She’d known him to be stoic and a complete sadsack. Over the past eight weeks she’s seen him laugh so uproariously he choked on his _vatrushka,_ she’s seen him curl up on the couch like a cat and stretch like one too; he talks their ears off about the Dodgers whenever he can catch the sports channel on the TV and he makes stupid, dirty jokes at the worst times. He cooks the best eggs she’s ever tasted, he reads Dostoyevsky, he chainsmokes. 

Like right now for example. 

“Hey, all-spice.”

Mary grins at the nickname and comes over to sit next to him. “What are you doing up here?”

“Missing my dogs,” he says to the sky. “And my big lumberjack of a boyfriend.”

At that, Mary grins. Walking into his townhouse to find that he was living with Steve Rogers had been the ultimate form of validation. “You know,” she says, “Becca would’ve flipped her shit just to hear you say that.”

“Becca?” he asks, almost like he’s forgotten, and then: “ _Becca._ Holy shit.” 

Then his brows furrow. “Hold on: you knew her?” 

Mary nods. She takes his cigarette and studies it. When she had known him before the words were scrawled in bulky Russian characters: _he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live;_ other things. She would get so excited to see what they said, and it always made her sad to watch the words turn to ash.

“I used to go see her every Sunday,” Mary whispers after a drag. “She’d knit and tell me about the crazy people who lived in the care facility with her. God, I miss her.”

And Mary does, really. Lately it’s been like someone is cracking her chest open with a crowbar and constantly prying her rib cage further and further apart, trying to get at what’s inside. 

James shakes his head. “Last time I saw her, she was seventeen.” 

“Well she lived much longer than that,” Mary says. “She was fuckin’ hilarious, too. Used to make me laugh so hard I thought I might bust a lung.”

“You took care of her?”

Mary shakes her head. “More like the other way around. Becca kind of… woke me up after HYDRA. Helped me see things for how they really were. And she was so good with Peter.”

“ _Peter_ knew her?”

Mary nods. “She made him onesies and hats.”

James’ face breaks out into a grin. “ _Oy vey._ I can’t even picture her as an old lady. She must’ve really been something.”

“Yeah, she was.”

He’s quiet for a moment. Then, “You know, Nat told me about some of the shit you did for me, and I remembered… that house in Houston? Was that real?”

Mary nods slowly. 

James sighs. “God. This whole time I thought no one was looking out for me but Steve, and you were right there the whole time. I’m so sorry, Maria.”

“What for?”

“Putting you through all that bullshit. You deserved a better life.”

Mary scoffs. “The only reason I’ve got any life is you,” she says. “You kept me alive. You gave me a reason to _keep going._ If anything I should be thanking you.”

James opens his mouth and then closes it. “Agree to disagree. Hey, so what the hell are we anyway? Because I know I was like your dad before, but now we’re uh…”

“It’s okay, you can say it: I’m old as fuck compared to you.”

James laughs. “That’s not what I was gonna say.”

“Sure.” She looks at him—really looks, takes in the scars and the stubble and the short hair, and says: “How about friends?”

“Okay by me.”

They shake on it.

* * *

The bunker in Kiev isn’t empty. 

It’s the first time their fight actually gets physical. Peter finds himself in a kind of trance: his body moves on autopilot, relying solely on all of Nat’s training and his sixth sense. 

He dodges before the bullets can touch him. He ducks when he knows Natasha needs to get past him. It’s an old move of theirs: he crouches down and she flips over him, using his back as a spring. Peter doesn’t even think before he does it. 

Then they’re fighting back to back, perfectly in sync because they’ve done it together a million times before. He knows all of her moves. She knows all of his. He knows where she needs help—as deadly as she can be, she’s also fucking tiny, which means he tends to kind of carry her and toss her around like they’re performing a fucking gymnastics routine, but Steve does the same thing so she’s used to it. Nat watches his six. She’s creative with how she kills, clever with the way she moves, careening and using her body to take people down instead of just relying on her weapons. 

But she uses those too: her garrotte, her guns; flash grenades, widow bites. 

At one point Peter launches a web at one wall, wraps the biocable around the neck of a soldier, and pulls. 

Hard. 

“You took the whole ‘cut off one head’ thing literally, I see,” Nat says dryly. 

Peter can’t even process it. He can’t _look._ He doesn’t have a comeback for her. 

The enemy keeps coming and coming and they’re forced to fall back, the four of them, barring themselves inside some kind of vacated operating room to avoid getting hit with canisters of some kind of gas. 

Peter’s shoulder is aching. He hadn’t realised he’d been shot until right now and really doesn’t care either way. “They’re using rubber bullets,” he grits at Natasha after feeling for a wound and finding none. 

Nat’s jaw tightens. She finishes reloading her gun. “Well isn’t that cute.”

“I’ve never seen HYDRA fight like this,” Mary pipes up. “They’re not even using a tactical approach. It’s chaotic and unorganised and—”

“They’re new to this,” Bucky surmises. “They’ve been trained for it, but these aren’t seasoned fighters we’re dealing with, here.”

“They want us alive,” Peter concludes. “They didn’t know we were coming, but they know exactly who we are. Someone definitely ordered them to set their phasers from kill to stun.” 

Barnes snorts. 

Nat just nods, absorbing all of this information and ignoring his dumb joke. “Okay,” she says after a minute. “You ready?”

Peter gives her a deadpan look. “Is that a real question?” 

“Well I just thought maybe you needed an extra minute or something—”

“Sweet Jesus, open the door.” 

* * *

“For the love of God, just sit on the chair normally,” Peter says, dropping out of the ceiling vent he’d crawled through to get into the server room. 

They’ve covered about three fourths of the bunker. Mary and Bucky are leading the fight down below while Peter and Nat gather as much intel as possible. It’d be nice if they could actually get their hands on an agent to interrogate, but every time they get close enough, they pop their fucking cyanide tablet and kick it. 

Nat grins at him. She’s perched on the back of a chair and balancing precariously. Fucking ridiculous. Peter would laugh if he wasn’t feeling so salty. 

He leans over her shoulder. “Well?”

“It’s Ross,” she says. “He’s rebuilding HYDRA from the scraps we left behind.” She shakes her head and blows a bubble with the gum Peter didn’t even know she was chewing. “I kept telling Rogers, if you wanna get rid of a weed you’ve gotta pull it up by the root. Did he listen? No. He just gave up after he found Barnes.”

Peter raises an eyebrow. “Kind of hard to pull up roots you can’t even see.”

Nat gives him a look. “It’s our job, if you hadn’t noticed.”

Peter looks back. “No, it’s _your_ job. Steve is a GI from the forties. I’m a street fighter. It’s your own fault for choosing the most idiotic himbos on the planet to help you do your dirty work.”

Nat laughs out loud. It makes Peter’s lip twitch. God, why does staying mad at her have to be so hard? She’s _impossible_ to hate. 

“There’s a facility I found,” she says when she sobers. “It’s not far. They’re performing… experiments.” 

“On people?”

“No, on gerbils. _Yes,_ on people.”

“Like White Snake.”

“Precisely.”

“You think that was Ross, too?” 

Nat shrugs. “We’ll have to see. I’m downloading as much as I can, but this shit is encrypted pretty well. Might take a while to decode.”

“Well that’s what _my_ magic fingers are for.” 

Nat rolls her eyes. “You’re insufferable, did you know that?”

“Thanks, I try.”

Then he leans away abruptly and rounds on the agent attempting to sneak in behind them. Peter flicks his wrist and aims his biocables directly for their chest. They writhe with the jolt of electricity his taser webs emit and then start frothing at the mouth. 

“Dammit,” he mutters. “I really thought that might work.”

Nat looks at the dead agent with indifference. “It was his choice. Not your fault he made the wrong one.”

“Yeah, but it still sucks.”

She yanks her flash drive free. “Let’s go.”

* * *

“You okay?”

Her question has his hand stalling, and then he turns away from the door to his hotel room. They’d landed an hour ago and stowed the Quin in an abandoned factory. They’re only here long enough to get some sleep and shower. 

Nat is standing in the hallway holding a bucket of ice. 

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you don’t look okay,” Nat says easily. 

Peter leans against the wall and looks down at the floor for a minute. It’s covered in ugly carpeting that probably hasn’t been updated since the seventies, which is kind of gross now that he thinks about it. 

“Why do you care?” he finds himself asking—not to be cruel or anything, he’s just genuinely curious. 

Nat shifts her bucket and looks him up and down. “I’ve known you for a long time,” she says, softer now, “and even during the Snap you were never this bad.”

He chews on that. It seems true. Feels true. 

“I’m fine.”

“Bullshit.”

“ _Natasha._ ”

“Peter,” she retorts, but it bites. “You’re not fine. Don’t even bother trying to pull that shit on me. I know that I—that I’m part of the reason, that what I did…” she takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry. Really, I am. I miss you.” 

He raises an eyebrow. “Are we really having a heart to heart in the hallway of a haunted hotel?”

“Don’t deflect.”

He groans and looks away, shifting with the general discomfort that he’s been nursing for weeks now. He aches all the way down to his bones. His head is constantly pounding with a chronic migraine. He can’t sleep. He can’t eat. 

“Fine, I’m not okay. Happy?”

“Why would that make me happy?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “First step to fixing a problem is admitting that there is one, I guess.”

The corner of her mouth twitches, but it fades as quickly as it comes. “I just need you to know that I’m here. I know you don’t _want_ to come to me right now, but it doesn’t change anything for me.”

“Can I just—” he takes a deep breath because his chest hurts so fucking badly. “Why did you do it? Was it really just because she asked?”

Nat shifts. “No,” she admits after a second. “I mean, mostly. I don’t think you realise how much she… I would do anything for her, _Petya._ She’s my big sister, you know? She raised me.”

He grits his teeth. “What about the other reason?”

“I was afraid you’d go looking for her,” she blurts tearfully, and his head snaps up. “That you’d find her and that she’d… that she would hurt you. Kill you, even.”

_Fuck,_ he thinks, because that’s absolutely valid. He probably would have. Peter runs a hand down his face, thinks for a second, and then says, “Put the bucket down.”

“What?”

“The _bucket,_ Natasha.”

She sets it down and Peter doesn’t waste any more time pulling her into his arms. Nat stiffens for a second and then sags against him, letting out the smallest sob before she reins herself in. Still she shakes, and clings to his shirt, and he can feel her tears falling on his shoulder. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “For being a dick, I mean.”

“You don’t have to be sorry—”

“Yes I do. Don’t excuse my assholery, please, it’s insulting to us both.”

Nat laughs a little bit. “I’m sorry for lying and being a terrible friend.”

“I forgive you,” he says, and means it, too. 

“Are you sure?”

“ _Nat.”_

She leans back and sniffs, wiping her cheeks roughly. “I’m just saying, it’s okay if you wanna be mad a little bit longer.”

“You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think you’re just already sick of me talking,” he jokes. “You liked the silent treatment because it meant no one was actually challenging your stupid opinions, and on that note I’d like to bring up what you said last week about almonds being the superior nut—”

Nat laughs and shoves him. “Go to bed, Petya.”

“No, I’m serious, it’s actually outrageous that you think that, I almost bit my own tongue off trying not to argue with you. I mean, peanuts are right there—”

“ _Petya.”_

“Yeah, yeah,” he unlocks his door. “Your ice is melting.” 

“Goodnight, Peter.”

“Night night, Nattie,” he calls over his shoulder, feeling lighter than he has in weeks.

* * *

That lightness ends soon after.

His mother is sitting on his bed. 

“Hey,” Peter says slowly. “What’s up?”

She purses her lips. “So you made up with Nat?”

“You were listening?”

A shrug. She still looks worn from earlier and Peter doesn’t blame her: she’d used her powers a lot during the fight—to kill, to maim, to disarm. She’d even used them to blast the soldiers back after they’d barricaded themselves in that OR. 

“Mary.”

“I have—” she stumbles over the words, “A wound on my back. It’s—I can’t really reach it—I tried to slap a bandage on it, but I still haven’t been able to really clean it out, or—”

“Okay,” he says. 

She sucks in a sharp breath. “Yeah?”

Peter nods. He holds out his hand and pulls her toward the little ensuite bathroom. He flicks on the light and starts ruffling through the bag he’d dropped in here earlier, trying to find a med kit that hasn’t been completely depleted already. He scavenges some suture supplies, gauze, and a bottle of peroxide. 

“Tub,” he says, and she sits on the edge. Peter washes his hands and then perches behind her. Mary lifts her shirt—a ratty old thing with a Led Zeppelin logo—to around mid-rib, exposing the bandage on her back that’s already bled through. 

Peter gloves up. He gently peels the bandage off and—yeah, okay, that’s deep. “Jesus, that’s gotta hurt.”

She grunts. “I’ve had worse, trust me.” 

He bites his lip, hesitates, and then starts to clean it, pausing when she hisses in pain or stops breathing altogether. He waits patiently and asks, “You good?”

“Fine,” she says, in a voice that shakes. “Just keep going.”

So he does. She winces through the stitches but says nothing. 

Then she sniffs and they both freeze.

“Sorry,” she whispers, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Shit, I don’t know why I—”

“It’s normal to cry when you’re in a lot of pain,” Peter says haltingly. “Your tears contain a chemical called leucine enkephalin. It’s a natural painkiller.”

To his surprise, she laughs. “God. Only _you_ would know that.” 

Peter grins a little. “My college roommate was a biomed major.”

She snorts and then says, “I wasn’t crying because of the pain.”

“So why, then?”

“Are you done?” she asks instead. 

“Uh, yeah,” Peter nods, ripping his gloves off as she stands up and lets the shirt fall back down. Then she looks at him, and her eyes are rimmed with red. He wonders: why the hell does she look more like him when she’s crying? 

“You want an honest answer?”

“Always,” he says. “Honesty is the best policy. It’s the bee’s knees, the cat’s meow—”

“I want what you and Nat have,” she cuts in, almost exasperated behind her smile. 

Peter falters. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” she nods. “Stupid, right. I just kind of think you’re the coolest thing since sliced bread, you know? So this awkwardness we have going on, it’s like, the opposite of the bee’s knees. The wasp’s elbows, if you will. The dog’s bark.”

He stares for a long minute and then bursts into laughter. 

“What?” she asks, laughing too anyway, and Peter has to put his head in his hands to catch his breath. 

“I’ve just never met anybody who’s the exact same kind of crazy as me,” he gasps.

Mary’s eyes are bright. Normally they’re a sharp, keen shade of green, but they light up when she laughs. Pepper’s do the same. 

Mary sits on the closed toilet lid. She reaches out to run a hand through his hair and he lets her, even if he has no idea why. 

“Can I show you something?”

He nods, finding it hard to speak, and so she places her hands on either side of his face and presses their foreheads together. 

And he sees: 

Him as a little kid lying under a patchwork quilt, her perched on the edge of his bed closing a worn chapter book. He can’t be older than four. She leans down to kiss his temple, but then he asks, “Will you always love me?”

Mary freezes. She looks down at him with sheer confusion and then, somewhat concerned, asks, “Why would I ever stop?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “What if I get boring?”

At that she laughs. “You? Boring? Baby, I don’t think that’s possible.”

He squirms a little under the blankets and then reaches for her face to hold her the same way she is Now, now. He pokes a dimple and, “What if I run out of new words to say? What if I’m an accoun’nt like the man in the book?”

Her lip quirks up. She kisses him again. “Then I’ll still love you.”

“Even if I wear _glasses?”_

“Yes,” she laughs. “Even then.”

He hums and then runs a finger down her nose, like it’s something he’s done a million times before. It scrunches under his touch. 

“Would you still love me?” she asks in a whisper.

He frowns. “If you were boring?”

“If I were bad,” she corrects, and sounds wretched. “Would you still?”

Peter stares at her for a long minute and then leans up, wrapping his arms around her neck. Mary holds him back, shaking a little even when he says, “Always.”

Then it’s over. He’s back in the bathroom. There are tears on his cheeks and there’s all this hope in her eyes, and Peter stands because _fuck,_ that was real. He remembers that. 

He runs a hand through his hair and looks back at her. “Jesus. Wow.”

She wipes her nose. “Yeah.”

“So we were pretty tight, huh?”

Mary laughs again. The sound takes the edge of his nerves, for some reason. It’s not even conscious, it’s instinct. He feels safe with her, which is probably insane considering her background, but still.

“You could say that.” She just barely meets his eye. “I don’t expect you to feel the same now, but I just… I wanted you to know that I do. I still love you. And I think you turned out pretty neat, for the record.”

“Neat,” he echoes weakly. “Well shucks.” 

“Shut up,” she stands up. “You know what I mean.”

Peter bites his lip and then nods. “Yeah, I do.” He fidgets a little because he’s the world’s most awkward fucker alive and then says, “I should probably get some sleep.”

“Right.” She clears her throat. “Night, Peter.”

“Night,” he returns, choking on _mom._

* * *

They decide to drive to the facility because of how close it is. 

The map puts it just downriver from Kiev, so they follow the highway. Peter and Bucky sit up front with Mary and Nat in the back. Bucky puts on Taylor Swift and actually starts _singing_ along to the music. Peter stares in horror for a solid, healthy five seconds before joining in. 

It’s fucking iconic. They sound great together and definitely should start a band or something.

Bucky pulls off the road to get gas at a Socar. It is, hands down, the cleanest gas station Peter has ever seen in his entire life. He doesn’t even feel the need to sanitize his hands after ducking inside to grab food. 

“Snackies,” he announces when he gets back, holding an armful of various junk foods and exactly one banana because Health. 

“Did you get the cucumber Lays?” Nat asks.

He hesitates and then produces them. Nat snatches them like a fucking preying mantis. “You’re the devil incarnate,” he deadpans.

“Then why’d you bring me my favorite chips?”

He stares. Blinks. “I can’t explain it.”

They keep driving and they’re still close to the city when the reception cuts out. “What the fuck,” Peter mutters, fiddling with the dial. 

There’s just static and spherics until the sound cuts back in, fuzzy and abrupt: “Absence… Ornament… Verify…”

“Stop the car,” Mary gasps from the back seat. “Turn that off—”

“What? Why? It’s just interference—” 

“Turn it off!” Bucky shouts, panicked now. 

“Aboriginal… Renew…” 

“Peter,” her eyes are wide, “ _turn it off.”_

“Okay, okay,” he says, and clicks the button. 

Nothing changes. 

“Sunflower,” says a low voice, and Peter’s heart starts to pound as he realises what this. “Zinc… Violate…”

Mary goes stiff in the back seat. A beat passes. 

“Status?” asks the man in the radio. 

“Ready to comply,” Mary whispers.

* * *

It goes like this:

Bucky veers off the road and into oncoming traffic, either accidentally or on purpose—Peter isn’t sure. They get hit in the left side just as Mary unbuckles her seatbelt, rocks with the motion, and pretty much kicks Nat out of the car and onto the highway. 

Peter has just enough time to think, _Oh fuck._

He ducks out of the car right before it goes over the side of the bridge they’d been driving across. Peter rolls. Cars swerve around him. Some of them come to a full stop while others speed past and honk their horns like _he’s_ the problem, here. 

He doesn’t have time to think. He goes to Nat, who is safe on the sidewalk and just getting to her feet. She’s definitely sporting a broken arm if the way it’s twisted is anything to go by. 

“Fuck,” he breathes. 

“Peter,” Nat snaps urgently, “where is she?”

A car zips past and whips her hair. Peter shakes his head. “What?”

Nat grabs his jacket. ” _Maria._ Where did she _go?”_

“I don’t—I don’t know—”

Nat pushes past him. She scans the highway and Peter turns just in time to see a metal arm clawing at the rail on the opposite side of the road. Thank the sweet Jesus, Bucky is still alive. He heaves himself over, panting and bloody. 

“ _Where the hell is she?!”_ He shouts over traffic. 

Nat shakes her head. “We have to find her!” 

Bucky nods in agreement. Right then, the engine of a motorcycle revs almost like it’s _trying_ to get their attention. 

Mary is on it.

She speeds past them, back toward the city they’d come from. 

“Shit,” Nat hisses. “Fuck, this is bad.”

Peter once again finds himself unable to speak. In a weird way he finds himself strangely unsurprised by the situation: this whole time he’d just been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and here it is. 

It’s an ugly loafer of a shoe, too. The kind you find at the bottom of a used sneaker bin in a Goodwill. 

Nat is already moving. She yanks open the driver’s side door of a Renault. The guy inside had probably stopped to see if they were okay only to get screamed at by the Black Widow herself. “We need your vehicle,” she says, grabbing him by his coat and pulling him out. “So sorry, Avengers business.”

Peter is about to climb inside without even questioning any of this, and then: “Let me drive.”

“Peter—”

“Your arm is broken,” he snaps. “Let me fucking drive, Natasha.”

She swallows roughly and then jerks a nod. They switch sides. Bucky runs over and climbs into the back, muttering a series of swear words under his breath—none of which are in the same language.

“Buckle up, buttercups,” Peter says, and peels out.

* * *

“You know, the powers are a lot less cool when they’re being used _against_ us,” Peter grunts about twenty minutes later. 

“Tell me about it,” Nat retorts. She’d set them up with comms during the chase and Peter is thankful for it, because otherwise he’d be completely in the dark right about now.

So far Mary’s shot four civilians, led them through a hospital—he’d jumped out a window, he wants that on record—and teleported to the top of an office building, which they are now on top of. 

Peter is hunched behind an AC unit on a rooftop. He knows that she’s close. He can fucking _feel_ it: a sort of tugging in his stomach that seems to be tied to his spidey sense. It’s how he’d known to find her here. 

“Just your average mother-son bonding time,” Peter mutters to himself, reaffirming his grip on his gun, “yay.”

“Web her up if you can,” Nat says. “We want her alive.”

“Yeah, no shit, Natasha.”

Only he doesn’t get the chance to web her up: Mary fires off a round in his direction and one of the bullets actually manages to graze him, though he has little idea how. Peter is forced to abandon his cover. He rolls and hauls ass, relying on his sixth sense not to get shot again. “How far out are you two?”

“Not far,” Nat says. “Took a wrong turn but I’m almost there.”

“Just hang tight, kid,” Bucky adds. 

“Hanging,” Peter says, now standing behind the brickwork wall with the door he assumes leads down below—he wouldn’t know, having crawled up the side himself.

Peter looks down.

There’s a little bloodstain on the concrete and it’s not from him. 

Her nose. It bleeds after she uses her powers. 

“ _Fuck,_ ” he says, and peeks out from behind the wall. A bullet misses him by inches. “My mother, ladies and gentlemen.”

Right then there’s a sharp clang and the sound of a gunshot muted with a silencer. That’s Nat. Peter whispers something about being saved and leans around again, only to find the three of them literally kicking the shit out of each other. 

“Oh, cute,” he says, and then decides he’s had just about enough of this fuckery. 

He aims his webs for Mary’s legs and yanks. She falls but doesn’t make a sound. Bucky holds her down. Nat uses the butt of her gun to knock her unconscious. 

It’s easy.

It’s… 

It’s too fucking easy. 

“Thanks,” Nat says to him, producing a pair of handcuffs from somewhere on her person. She puts them on Mary’s wrists and closes them as tight as they go. 

Peter stares down at them all. Then he looks around, scanning the various rooftops, listening to the sirens below. 

“Natasha,” Peter says quietly, “why are we here?”

“What do you mean?” She demands. “Never mind, don’t answer that. Just tie up her legs, would you? We have to get her away from—”

“Something is wrong,” Peter whispers, feeling sick with the certainty of it. “Nat, _why are we here?_ Up here I mean, specifically? Why would she lead us all here and just stop running—?”

Nat’s eyes widen at the last second. 

And then Peter’s stomach flips. The ground rumbles beneath his boots. The last thing he thinks before the explosion knocks him off his feet is: _you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me._

Then he’s swallowed by the impossible heat of an inferno. 


	4. come home, perry

  
“I see that you’re smoking.”

Pepper doesn’t bother to look over. “Shut up.”

“Well that’s one way to speak to your husband, also known as the absolute love of your life.”

She isn’t in the mood for jokes. Frankly, she kind of feels like vomiting all the time. Her brain refuses to function at a normal capacity; time moves slowly and collapses inward. 

Pepper takes a drag. “This is a stress cigarette,” she says, flicking ash into the little tray on the table. “Pretend you don’t see it.”

Tony hums. He comes over slowly, hands in his pockets and not quite meeting her eye, the way people sneak up on cats so they don’t tear off. Pepper finds herself kind of endeared by it, and it’s the first time in days she’s felt anything but stress. 

She nudges the chair opposite her. Tony takes the invitation and sits. 

“May I?” 

He’s looking at the cigarette with a raised eyebrow. Pepper thinks about saying no, what with his heart and all, but it would be pretty hypocritical. She hands it over. 

Tony takes it. “Thanks,” he says, and instead of pulling from it he puts it out. 

“Party pooper,” she mutters, lip twitching up against her own will. 

“Secret smoker,” he retorts. 

Pepper leans back. She folds her arms over her chest. “So?”

“So, it’s three in the morning and I woke up from my regularly scheduled nightmare to find myself alone in bed. I got sad, I got curious, I smelled smoke. The end.”

“Riveting.”

“Thanks, I’m thinking of getting it published.”

“I could send a query to Simon & Sheuster for you.”

“ _Sweetie,_ ” Tony says softly, eyes soft and full of heartbreak. He reaches across the table and grabs one of her wrists and Pepper feels like crying— _really_ crying. She hasn’t in days and it seems like it’s about time to break the streak. 

Pepper puts her head in her hands for a second and tries to breathe, but each inhale is more like a gasp; every exhale a sob. “It’s been almost three months,” she says after a few minutes of this, voice thick. “ _Three months,_ Tony, and what have we done? What are we _doing_ about this?”

Her husband fidgets and then runs a hand down his face. “I uh… I don’t know.”

“What do you _mean_ you don’t _know?!”_ Him, Tony Stark, the man who made a suit from scraps and broke himself out of a terrorist ring; her idiot of a husband who always has a solution for everything, who accommodates for every single foreseeable future possible. Pepper shoots out of her chair with disbelief. 

“Pep,” he says, standing too, “honey, I don’t—I can’t do anything. Don’t you think I would have if I could? He disabled the trackers, he didn’t take his suit or his phone so I can’t find him that way, he turned _FRIDAY_ off—”

“I don’t care!” Pepper explodes. God, she _knows_ all of this. They’ve been over it and over it. “What if he’s not okay? What if he’s—”

She cuts herself off. She can’t say it. She can’t even _think_ it. 

Tony puts his hands on his hips and sucks in a sharp breath like he’s trying to keep it all in, tightly packed and compacted. “He’s not. We would know.” A pause. “We _would_ know that, right?”

Pepper is silent for a long second. Then she shakes her head and walks into the kitchen. She roots through the fridge and finds a pitcher of juice in the back. Pours them both a glass and slams them on the table. 

“I want to be mad at him,” she grits out after a minute, “but I’m too _afraid_ to be mad, because what if he’s hurt? What if he didn’t even _want_ to leave?”

Tony nods. He looks down at the orange liquid in his cup. It’s pulpy. He hates pulp. 

“I don’t know what to do,” he whispers after a minute. There are tears in his eyes and his voice is completely broken. “Honey, I don’t… I can’t fix this one. I’ve tried. I’m still trying but it’s not—it’s not looking so good. I just have to focus on what I _can_ control here or I’m gonna lose my fucking mind.”

Pepper nods. She sits down again. Lights another cigarette. 

“You should go back to bed,” she croaks after a minute. “We have meetings in the morning.”

He looks at her sadly and then nods. “Yeah. Okay.” Then, “Hey Pep?”

“Yeah?”

“He’ll come home.”

She meets his eyes and sees all of her own pain reflected there, along with a sliver of hope that she doesn’t have anymore. It had died away around the second year after Tony had been snapped away, and it still hasn’t come back. 

He’ll come home, sure, but when? She’d lost Tony for five years. Will it be six for Peter? Seven? 

“Goodnight, Tony.”

Tony’s mouth twists. He awkwardly pats the back of the nearest chair. “Night, Pep.”

He retreats into the dark hallway and Pepper watches the mouth of it for a long time, trying to find shapes in the shadows. 

* * *

It’s summer and sticky, the kind of day that leaves MJ constantly uncomfortable—sweat on her upper lip and in her edges, around the collar of her pressed white shirt; it’s too hot to stay inside but not much better outside, either. 

This is the fifth time she and Steve have gone to the park together. 

It had started with them meeting up to let Indy and Mattie play together, and one time he’d brought along his sketchbook, and the next thing she knew they were like, drawing buddies or whatever. 

They’re both quiet now as the dogs wrestle in the grass. MJ wipes her forehead for the millionth time that day and then goes back to shading her drawing—most of her book is filled with Peter, both old sketches and new ones, but right now she’s drawing Steve himself.

He’s an easy subject: solid and still and sure of himself. He’s wearing a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm and she can’t quite figure out how to translate every wrinkle in it to the page. It’s fucking annoying as hell. 

“Is it my imagination,” he says after a while of this, “or are you admiring my biceps?”

MJ rolls her eyes. “I’m not _admiring._ I mean, granted—specimen—but no. I’m drawing you. Look.”

She shows him. Steve spends a few minutes staring down at the paper, tracing the crooked arc of his back and the edge of his jaw, still masked by his beard even in the summer. He tilts his head. “That’s real good,” he says softly.

MJ shrugs. “I try.”

“No, I mean…” he shakes his head. It’s the first time she’s actually shown him one of her drawings. “It’s kind of ridiculously good. Why don’t you draw for a living?”

MJ feels her cheeks flush. She accepts the sketchbook when he hands it back. “I don’t know. My family never really had a lot of money, so when I thought about a career I didn’t really let myself, like, follow my heart or whatever. I had to do something practical, something that would make money. Art isn’t that.”

“So therapy,” he surmises. 

“ _Art_ therapy,” she returns with a small grin. “I found my way around the system.”

Steve grins. It makes his whole face light up, which is a pretty rare thing these days. Sometimes it still gets her: the fact that they’re in the same boat—the U.S.S. _Abandoned & Broken-hearted—_feeling the same shit, going through the same emotional crap. The missing, the wondering. 

“Did you end up doing what you wanted?”

She can see the way the question throws him, like it’s the first time anybody’s ever asked. She figures that’s actually probably accurate. 

“What do you mean?”

“I _mean,”_ MJ smudges out the hem of his graphite trousers, “does this superhero shit even make you happy? Because like, no offense, but you’ve always seemed pretty miserable to me—even before Barnes took off.”

Steve opens his mouth. 

Closes it. 

“Hercules, Jason, Theseus,” he says after a second, “their stories are all tragedies.” 

“You like Greek?”

“Bucky did and I had to listen to him rant about it all the time. It used to annoy the shit out of me because I was a scrappy poor kid with a dead mom, so I never even had the chance to get educated like he did. I’d give anything to hear him talk about it now, though.” He sucks in a sharp breath and shakes his head before he can get lost in that. “Anyway, I had a point.”

“Which is…?”

“Happiness isn’t in my cards. I’m uh—not to sound like an arrogant asshole—but I’m just not meant for that. I’m supposed to be the hero, and typically the heroes don’t get happy endings. Besides, I lived through the Second World War. There were a lot of men who set aside what they felt just to do what was right, you know? They had to. What we wanted didn’t matter anymore, our dreams weren’t important, and we were okay with that.”

MJ chews her lip. “That’s kind of how I felt during the snap,” she admits softly. “Like nothing mattered, only I didn’t really have something else to focus on instead. I just felt… guilty. I already felt guilty my whole life just for existing and then I… I lived. I always felt like it was a mistake, like some kind of cosmic fuck up.”

Steve studies her. “Survivor’s guilt.”

“Yeah.”

“A lot of folks had that. They’d talk about it in the meetings I used to run.”

MJ keeps her gaze focused on the paper. This immovable, intangible Steve is much easier to speak to than the real-life flesh version in front of her. 

“Hmm.”

“‘ _Hmm’_?” Steve nudges her with his shoe. “What does ‘hmm’ mean?”

MJ shrugs. Her chest feels tight.

“I just…” she struggles to keep her voice level. “I don’t think Peter was happy and I think it was my fault. I think I drove him away.” 

“Oh,” Steve says softly. And then, “Kid, no. That wasn’t you, okay? Really, it wasn’t.”

“But I told him to _leave,_ ” MJ croaks, unable to keep it in anymore. “I told him to _go._ If I hadn’t—if I had just—”

“You did what you thought was right in the moment,” Steve says. “You did what was best for _you,_ and before you say anything, there’s a difference between rational self-interest and being selfish, okay? You couldn’t have known what was gonna happen next, and what’s more, _Nat_ called him. She still would have no matter where he’d been that morning.”

MJ grits her teeth at that but stays silent. 

“What is it?” asks Steve.

“Nothing.”

“Michelle,” Steve presses, “talk to me.”

“He always picked her over me,” MJ blurts, cheeks flushing with embarrassment. “God, it was so fucking _annoying,_ you know? It was like they had their own secret little club and I wasn’t a part of it no matter how hard I tried or how many times I proved myself. And on _top_ of that, she deliberately didn’t tell me all this bullshit about Peter’s genetics! She always kept me out of the fucking loop! I just—it’s so _typical_ that if anyone could drag him off for months on end, it’s _her.”_

Steve blinks. “You feel pretty strongly about this, huh?”

“Oh my god.”

He actually laughs at that because he’s an impertinent jackass. “Natasha Romanoff has a way of making everything seem like the end of the world,” he tells her. “And as someone who’s just as much under her thumb as Peter, I can tell you that refusing her anything isn’t really an option. She does what she wants the way she wants to do it. Control is a big thing for her; she barely had any her entire life. Trust is another thing. It takes a lot to earn hers, and as I recently discovered myself, I didn’t have it for half as long as I thought I did.”

MJ chews on that. “Doesn’t really excuse him basically being her personal simp.”

“Simp?”

“Don’t worry about it,” MJ sets her sketchbook aside because she no longer has any motivation to draw. She runs a hand over her braids and sits back. “I just hate this. I hate that he’s gone and she’s probably got him doing something dangerous.” 

Steve hums. “You know that one movie with the werewolves—how they imprint on people?”

“You watched Twilight?” 

He brushes this off even though it’s like, groundbreaking information. “Nat kind of claimed Peter has her personal sidekick, you know? She can get real territorial about things like that. When you broke up and she gave him a chance to fuel all that bullshit into something constructive, it was probably easy to jump at the chance.”

MJ plucks a fistful of grass, an old habit leftover from childhood. “He was pissed at me is what you’re trying to say, right?” 

“What I’m _trying_ to say to you is that every disagreement has dimensions. There are two sides to every fight and there’s the truth of the thing right in the middle. You’ve gotta find that truth, you know? Stop looking at it through the lens of who did what and just _see it,_ objectively. And tell me: do you think that someone like Peter could be happy? Or do you think maybe he was a hop skip away from a breakdown and _maybe,_ you were kind of the last thing tethering him to normalcy. _And_ maybe when you cut that tie, you cut him as loose as loose goes.”

MJ frowns. “Have you ever considered therapy?”

“I go once a week.”

“I meant,” she shakes her head, smiling now, “that’s great, but I meant it the other way around.”

Steve blushes. “I don’t know. I’ve got too many issues to spend time figuring out everyone else’s.”

“You figured out mine.”

“Yeah, well,” he shrugs. “You’re my best girl. Makes you a special case.” 

Normally MJ would snort at the sentiment and brush him off, but this is _Steve,_ who has all of these Sad Dude vibes practically radiating off of him. He’s lonely and he’s actually pretty sweet. 

She’s saved from having to answer when Mattie bounds over and starts tugging at Steve’s hand. They start play fighting in the grass and MJ watches, wishing she had the motivation to draw this, too.   
  


* * *

Morgan tries to pilé for the third time and stumbles, promptly grunting and falling onto her ass. She glares up at Tony. “I hate this. I don’t wanna do it.”

Tony tilts his head to the side. “That’s not what you said when you dragged me out of bed this morning so we could practise.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Oh,” Tony says, and then lowers himself to the floor so he can sit opposite her, cross legged and intrigued. “So what do you wanna do instead?”

“Nothing.”

She’s resting her face in her palms and staring glumly at the floor now, not even meeting his eye. Tony likes to think he’s gotten to know her pretty well over the past few months, and if there’s one thing he’s learned it’s that a glum, angsty Morgan just… isn’t a thing. 

This is new. This is new and probably very bad. 

“Wanna tell me what’s got you down, Eeyore?”

“Eeyore?”

Tony fake gasps. “You mean to tell me that you haven’t seen—” he shakes his head. “Never mind, it’s not important. I know that move, by the way. I _invented_ that move. You’re good at it though, I’ll give you that. Almost worked on me.”

Morgan slumps down even further. “I don’t wanna do anything.”

“Morgan…” Tony trails off and looks down at her for a long minute as she curls up in a complete ball. He puts his hand on her back. “Honey, I know this is hard—”

“You don’t know _anything!”_

The force with which she says it, shooting upright, face red, takes Tony aback. He finds himself speechless as she continues, “You don’t even know _me!_ You don’t understand!” a sob, “I just wanna go home!” 

Then she’s gone, running out of the ballet studio that Tony had built years ago for Nat to practise in, leaving Tony staring slack-jawed at his own reflection.

* * *

“Hello?”

“Hi, hey, hi, um—can you come over?”

MJ sits up in bed and squints at nothing in particular. “What is it? Did you find something or—”

“No, no, it’s not that, I just,” there’s a sigh from the other end of the line as Tony Stark finally drops the charade. He’s miserable when he says, “It’s Morgan. She’s upset and Pepper is away on business and I don’t know what the hell to do.”

MJ flops back against her mattress. She glares at the random pictures and cut outs Peter had taped to the bed’s tester. “You know, it’ll never change if you don’t stop being a chicken about it.”

“I’m not being a chicken.”

She raises an eyebrow. “You sure about that? Because if I’m your cavalry, Stark—”

“Just _please?”_ He cuts in. “I hate seeing her upset, but I have absolutely no idea how to help her. I’ve never been good with— _feelings,_ emotions—”

“Neither have I.”

“ _Michelle._ ”

MJ closes her eyes for a second and takes a deep breath. “Fine,” she says eventually. “Not like I have anything better to do, anyway.”

“Thank you, thank you, _thank you—_ ”

“Yeah, whatever.”

* * *

Stark is sitting on the living room couch when she arrives at the penthouse. He’s leaning forward and bouncing his knee, but he stops as soon as he sees her and shoots to his feet. “Hey,” he says. “I tried to go in there again, but she threw a stuffed orca at my head and threatened to call the police on me.”

MJ sets down her bookbag with a snort. “That’s so Peter of her.” Then she pauses. “Scratch that, it’s so _you_ of her. You’re seriously telling me that you can’t even handle a bite sized version of yourself?”

Tony screams delicately into his hands. “I just don’t know what to say.”

MJ rolls her eyes. “It’s not that hard, Anthony. She’s just scared.”

“Yeah, but what can I do? Lie to her? Tell her everything’s gonna be alright when I don’t actually _know_ it’ll be alright?”

“I think you’re overthinking it.”

“I think you’re _under_ thinking it.” 

MJ stares at him for a long second and then turns abruptly toward the hallway. She marches down with purpose but hesitates when she reaches Morgan’s door, hovering in front of it before knocking gently. 

“Go _away,”_ comes Morgan’s muffled groan. 

“Morgie,” MJ says. “Can I come in?”

A pause.

“Okay.”

MJ bites her lip as she slips inside. It’s been a good month since she’s actually seen Morgan; MJ’s been so preoccupied with work and Charlotte and the stuff with the baby, it’s been impossible to work up the energy to visit. 

Morgan noticed, and it’s apparent by the expression on her face: her mouth is twisted with anger, but the hurt shines through in her eyes. 

“Thought you were ignoring me.”

“Ignoring you?” MJ repeats softly, horrified. 

“Yeah,” Morgan says. “You don’t talk to me even when you come by to do your baby scans, you didn’t answer my phone call—”

“Your phone call?”

She blushes. “I stole Mommy’s phone out of her purse and left a message.”

“Oh,” MJ says stupidly. “I didn’t get it.”

“ _Liar.”_

“ _Morgan.”_ MJ finally pushes off the door and goes over to the bed. Morgan, in response, pulls her blanket over her head and hides underneath it like an angry turtle. “Morgan, I really didn’t get it, honest. I’ve been really busy okay? I promise that’s why you haven’t seen me.”

It’s not. Well, it is. 

But also…

Also it’s just really hard to be around someone who reminds her so much of Peter. She’d probably have completely shunned his family by now if she weren’t pregnant, as awful as that is. 

She’s glad she didn’t, though. Stark’s okay, and Morgan…

MJ runs her hand down the place where she figures Morgan’s arm is and then sits properly on the bed. “Your dad says you’re mad at him. Wanna tell me why?”

“He’s not my dad,” Morgan snaps. 

MJ opens her mouth. Closes it, and then her eyes. _He’d already be crying,_ she thinks. _He’d be fucking bawling by now._

“Why do you think that?” she asks by way of an answer.

“Because!” Morgan explodes free of the blankets, hair in her face and hovering with static electricity. “He just showed up and married Mommy and dragged us to this _ugly_ tower and I—I wanna go _home,_ Shelly. I _hate it here.”_

MJ feels something inside of herself crack. She reaches out and pushes Morgan’s hair from her eyes. “I can understand that.”

Sheepish now, “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” MJ says, pulling her closer. “But you know something else?”

“What?”

“A lot of people—including Peter—tried for a really long time to get your daddy back. Peter used to be _so_ upset that you didn’t know him.”

Morgan buries her face in the crook of MJ’s ribs, right above the little bump there. “I don’t care.”

“ _Morgan—”_

“He left,” Morgan says, voice hard now. “He just _went away._ I heard Mommy crying about it, so don’t try to lie to me like they did. I know he’s not on some stupid vacation.”

MJ sighs and then lowers herself so that they’re both lying down, facing the other. She strokes Morgan’s flushed cheek. “You’re right, he’s not.” 

It’s like she’s been waiting to hear it for _weeks_ and when MJ finally says it Morgan just _breaks._ Her eyes squeeze shut tight and she starts crying, her whole body shaking with silent sobs. MJ holds her and kisses the crown of her head the way she always does for Charlie. “Breathe, okay?”

Morgan does, in the form of a desperate gasp. Then, voice ragged, “Why did he _leave?”_

And MJ finds herself at a complete loss for words, just like how Stark probably felt. She rolls onto her back and thinks for a long minute. 

“Sometimes people just get really overwhelmed, you know? It’s like… if you blow air into a balloon and don’t stop, at some point it’ll pop, right? But instead of letting that happen, Peter just… he just let go.”

Morgan leans over her. “But _why?”_

“I don’t know why, baby, but it… it must have been a really important reason.”

Morgan sinks down in disappointment and rests her cheek on MJ’s stomach. “I miss him. I miss all of it, but I feel like I’m not allowed to.”

MJ shakes her head. “You’re allowed to feel however you want, Morgie.”

“But Mommy would be so upset if she knew,” Morgan whispers. “She _loves_ daddy.” 

MJ raises an eyebrow. “And you don’t?”

“I don’t _know._ ”

MJ studies her for a second and then nods. “That’s okay. It’s okay to not know yet, Morgan. And you know… I miss it, too. Things kind of made more sense back then, didn’t they? Now they’re all really confusing.”

Morgan nods. 

“I think we both just need to keep moving until life makes sense again. Does that sound good to you?”

Another, smaller nod. MJ’s glad to see it. She tucks Morgan’s hair behind her ear and waits until she falls asleep to leave.

Tony is waiting in the hall, on the floor with his elbows on his knees and his eyes rimmed with red.

MJ shuts the door softly. 

“You were listening?”

A shrug. “Thought I might pick up a few tricks. Not exactly what I got out of the conversation, though.”

MJ sighs. “She’s just confused. She grew up in a world where you didn’t even exist and now she feels obligated to—”

“No, I know. I heard.”

“Tony,” MJ says softly, sitting down beside him. “It’s not worth it if it’s not real.”

He sniffs inelegantly and runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah. Right.”

MJ crosses her legs in front of her. “I have a proposition for you.”

“And what’s that?”

“Let her come to stay with me for a few days in the apartment,” MJ says. “It’s where she grew up, it’s all she knew before this. Besides, maybe some time apart will do you both good.”

Tony huffs, thinking on it. 

“Jesus, fine. Maybe you’re right.”

“I’m always right. It’s appalling that you would even suggest otherwise.”

Stark outright laughs at that, and it feels like a victory.

* * *

Ariel pulls her jacket sleeve for the millionth time that day. 

They’re in an elevator and it’s going up. It won’t stop until they’re on floor ten. At that point they’ll walk down a hallway and come to a door, and on the other side of it—

On the other side of it is a woman. 

She’s short and blonde and tanned. She looks nothing like Ariel’s mother at all, and for some reason that fact is like a slap to the face. 

“Hi,” she greets, in a flat and unremarkable voice. “You must be Harley and Ariel? I’m Amber.”

“Amber,” they both repeat dumbly, and then look at each other. 

_Fuckin’ Jesus,_ Harley says with his eyes. 

_I know right?_ Ariel says back. 

“Well come in,” Amber says, stepping aside to let them through. “I put the pot roast in the oven a while ago, so it should be ready pretty soon.”

Ariel swallows and steps over the threshold slowly, feeling a little like she’s gonna be burned the minute she’s inside. 

Only nothing happens. No one jumps out with a fucking cast iron. No curtain falls back to reveal an audience laughing at her stupidly agreeing to attend this fucking dinner party. 

“Fuckin’ hell,” Ariel breathes, so only Harley will hear as Amber—wearing a pair of high heels _in her house,_ God, not even Pepper does that—leads them deeper inside. “This place is huge.”

“I know,” he says. “I almost blew a gasket the first time I saw it.”

Ariel snorts. 

“So Ariel!” Amber says brightly, clapping her hands together. “That’s a pretty name! Like the princess?”

“Like the motorcycle,” Ariel corrects. 

“Oh,” Amber says. “ _Oh!_ Wow, your mom had a whole theme going, huh?”

“Yeah,” Ariel agrees. “Probably would’ve gotten all the way to Yamaha if Daddy hadn’t skipped out on us.”

Harley elbows her while Amber stills, and yeah, Ariel sorta feels bad about it. It’s not like this lady had anything to do with Daddy being a complete prick, after all. 

So being the tactful mastermind that she is, Ariel asks, “Where are _your_ babies?”

If there’s one thing Ariel learned from candy striping at the Rose Hill nursing home, it’s that every Mama likes to gush about her babies. 

Predictably Amber brightens. “Their nursery just down the hall! Did you wanna meet them?”

“Yeah, why not?” Ariel says, like it’s not the sole reason she came here at all. 

So Amber beams and leads the way. Harley makes a pathetic little distressed noise and takes the rear, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans. 

They’re way underdressed. Amber is in some chiffon and lace _thing_ and the whole suite smells like… well Ariel doesn’t fuckin know what the scent is, but it smells expensive. Like Chanel and real leather— _disgusting._

The nursery is a huge room—bigger even than the one Ariel used to have when she was a fully grown kid. There are two cribs right in the middle, which looks as creepy as it sounds, but the floor to ceiling windows kind of brighten everything up and make it all seem less ominous. 

Ariel leans over one crib. 

Harley leans over the other. 

“That’s Rosie,” Amber says of the baby right underneath Ariel. “And Samuel.”

Sam and Rosie. 

Ariel is absolutely furious at how adorable they are. It’s simply not fair. She can’t even be mad at them or resent them or blame them for anything when they look like that: all chubby and wide-eyed and _babie._

Amber ruins it by saying, “I always preferred more civilised names. We almost went with Thomas but decided against it.”

“Civilised,” Ariel repeats slowly, looking up, “as opposed to our backwoods hick names, that is?”

Harley makes another little distressed noise and Amber’s eyes widen as if she’s just realising what she said. Her cheeks flush. “Oh, I didn’t mean—”

“You’re here!”

It’s funny: being afraid of her father is like muscle memory. Even after all these years she still hasn’t forgotten, and at the sound of his voice her stomach flips. Ariel takes an automatic step back and stares at the man in the doorway—the very same man who approached her in tears at the park months ago; the same man who left her, completely dry-eyed, when she was five. 

He’s lost a few pounds since then and some hair to boot, but he’s still tall and bulky. He’s dressed better and cleanly shaven, but Ariel knows. Amber might not, but Ariel does. 

This man used to be a backwoods hick just like her. He used to have a scraggly beard that itched when he kissed her forehead. He used to chew tobacco and spit into a beer can. He used to scream at her until she started bawling, and one time he even hit Mama. 

Another time he’d hit Harley. Ariel knows that for a fact because she saw it happen through the crack in his bedroom door, but every time she asks about it—which is almost never—he denies it. 

She’d never really forgotten all of it, but she’d managed to push it to some dark, unused corner of her mind. 

Now she’s brought it back into the light and all she wants to do is run. God, what were they _thinking_ coming here?!

“I was just introducing them to the twins,” Amber says brightly, like nothing at all is wrong, like this man’s presence isn’t the equivalent of a cloud passing in front of the sun. 

“Look at that,” Daddy says marvellingly. “All four of you together in one room.”

Ariel feels a wave of nausea creep up her throat like a snake. She swallows it down as best as she can. “Is there a bathroom I can use?”

Amber nods. “Just down the hall and to the left.”

* * *

Ariel locks herself inside and sits down on the edge of the porcelain tub. God, these assholes are loaded. The floor is made out of _real marble_ and all of the faucets are _gold._

Cassie picks up the phone on the third ring. “Hey stupid,” she says. “I thought you had the dinner?”

“I’m at the dinner,” Ariel says quietly, climbing right into the empty bathtub. “Well, we haven’t even eaten yet, but we met the twins.”

“Jesus,” Cassie breathes. “What are they like?”

“I don’t know, squishy? They’re babies, Cass. They just blinked at us.”

Cassie snorts. “Do either of them look like you?”

“They look like Harley,” Ariel says. “What are _you_ doing, anyway?”

“I’m on the BART coming back from my dad’s.”

“What’d y’all do?”

“We watched old Disney movies and he cried because I’m not nine anymore.” 

Ariel closes her eyes. “What’s your favorite Disney movie? I was always partial to Bambi.”

“ _Ari,_ ” Cassie says, voice soft over the phone, “what’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothin’s wrong. I’m perfectly fine.”

“You’re calling me in the middle of a dinner party,” Cassie says, “when you should be like—I don’t know, reconnecting with your dad or something.”

“I don’t wanna do that.”

“Then why go in the first place?”

“I don’t know,” Ariel fidgets uncomfortably. “Maybe I had the insane idea of kidnapping his kids because I don’t think he’s fit to parent.”

“Not fit to parent? What do you mean—”

Someone knocks on the door. Amber’s voice comes through, muffled, “Are you almost done, honey? Food’s on the table.”

“I gotta go. I love you,” Ariel whispers, and hangs up. 

* * *

Talking to Cass had helped a little, but Ariel feels sick again as soon as she sees what’s laid out on the table. 

She sits down. Daddy and Amber start to serve themselves. Harley is sitting rigid in his chair, working his jaw, and then, “Ariel’s a vegetarian.”

Amber freezes. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, I didn’t know.”

“That’s alright,” Harley says to her, and Ariel can’t believe this bullshit, she really can’t. “Ain’t your fault. It’s his.”

Daddy slowly lowers his arms and doesn’t speak for a long minute. Then, “I’m sorry, Ariel. I can call down and have something brought up for you, or—”

“It’s fine,” she says quickly. “I’ll just have the salad.”

He nods and passes the bowl over. Harley keeps glaring at him, and he’s flexing his hand under the table, and Ariel knows his heart is racing just as much as her own is now. It feels strange to be here, _wrong_ almost. She almost feels like she’s having brunch with an axe murderer or something. 

“So Harley,” Daddy says, “are you finishing up school?”

Harley blinks. “I’m already done. Got my degree in biomed like two years ago. Now I co-head the Research and Development department of Stark Industries.”

Daddy blinks. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So whereabouts are y’all—” he breaks off and clears his throat with a fleeting glance at Amber, who’s got her eyebrows raised. “Where are the two of you staying? Surely your mother would rather swallow a tire than live in the city?”

“We live with her,” Ariel says, sipping her juice. “In a townhouse. In Brooklyn. With Spider-Man.”

“With Spider-Man,” Amber repeats slowly, setting down her knife and fork like she’s starting to suspect they’re mentally deranged. “Um—”

“I thought no one had seen or heard from the guy in months?” Daddy asks. 

He’s trying to poke holes in their story because that’s what he always did, but Harley just shrugs. “That’s right. The house is mostly ours right now, what with his girlfriend living with Peter’s aunt.” 

“So normally you and your mother live with… a bunch of other adolescents?”

Ariel suddenly wants to scream or cry or something. Her fists ball, nails burrowing deep into the soft skin there. “Yeah, so? What’s wrong with that? New York is expensive as shit. At least this way I get to go to a good school and Harley can work at SI. Plus we get to be with our—” she stops, cheeks flaming. 

“With our family,” Harley finishes for her. 

Daddy looks between them. Then he shrugs. “You’re right, there’s nothing wrong with it,” he says, in a way that implies there is absolutely _everything_ wrong with it and more.

* * *

“I hate him,” Harley snaps as they storm out of the building around twenty minutes later. “Talkin’ all city like he didn’t come from the same shit-hick fuckpile as us—like he didn’t _leave us there?!_ Who the hell does he think he is?!”

Ariel grabs his wrist but he doesn’t stop, so she tugs on his cardigan. “Harls, hey, wait.”

Harley’s seeing red though. His hands rake through his curls and tug on them, but he knows she’s serious because she never calls him ‘Harls’ for nothing. That nickname had been left behind, settled with the dust of childhood after the Snap: an echo of Sunday morning cartoons and making forts in the living room during thunderstorms. 

“God, what?”

“I…” Ariel shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”

His brow scrunches up. “Sorry? What in Sam Hill are you sorry for? It’s not your fault he’s a fuckin’ prick.”

“Yeah, but I know you only agreed to come so I could meet the babies.”

His shoulders fall and he looks out onto the street for a long moment, eyes following the passing cabs and roaming pedestrians. “Come on,” he says softly. “Let’s go home.”

* * *

“I sorta forgot he existed until a few months ago,” Ariel whispers to Harley on the train later. “And I always wondered why I didn’t miss him the way you did.”

Harley raises an eyebrow. “You figure it out?”

“Yeah,” she says, and pinches his arm. “It’s ’cuz I don’t need a daddy when I’ve got a big dope like you lookin’ out for me.” 

Her brother’s lip quirks up and he pulls her to him, ruffling up her hair to make her squeal and then planting a kiss there. “You’re my favourite deputy,” he says to her, and Ariel grins. She wraps her arms around his stomach and lets herself fall asleep, jostled by the motion of the subway, safe here with her brother. 

* * *

Mama’s waiting up for them when they get back. She’s got a big mug of tea in front of her, which means she was real stressed out. There’s a pink pastry box centered in the middle of the table and it feels like a trap. 

“Where’ve you two been?” she asks as they kick off their shoes and throw their coats onto the back of the couch. 

“We went to see Daddy,” Ariel blurts, before Harley can make up some kind of lie.

He rounds on her with wide eyes, all _how could you?!,_ but Ariel ignores him. She looks right at their Mama, who’s gone so white she could be dead where she sits. 

“Oh,” she whispers after a few seconds. Then, “ _Oh._ Oh my god.”

“Yeah,” Ariel agrees. 

“He’s _here?”_

“Manhattan,” she says, coming over to sit opposite her mother at the kitchen table. “Livin’ pretty with some lady named Amber and their two kids.”

Mama swallows hard and shakes her head, looking like she might be sick. 

But she won’t be. She’s made of tougher stuff than that.

Harley pulls up a chair, too. He watches Mama anxiously, leg bouncing so rapidly he’s probably gonna cause an earthquake via the butterfly effect. 

“We didn’t mean to go behind your back,” he says softly, all earnest, reaching for her hand to hold. “We just didn’t wanna hurt you.”

“Me?” Mama shakes her head and looks between them. “It’s not _me_ you should’ve been worried about, Cricket, it’s _him._ He’s a dangerous man.” 

Ariel chews her lip. “He didn’t seem the way he used to. Didn’t get mad once. I don’t understand that.”

Mama sighs and opens the pastry box. Ariel leans in to get a look and sees, to her absolute delight, a bunch of chocolate covered strawberries. 

“Can I have one, or is this the part where you bite my head off and say ‘no eating in my classroom?’” 

Mama doesn’t get the joke because she’s uncultured swine. Instead she just rolls her eyes. “I bought them for _you,_ Twinkie. They’re made with soy milk.” 

“Oh,” Ariel says stupidly, and takes one.

Then Mama starts talking. “He was nice to me at first, too. He seemed charming and sweet and smarter than anyone I’d ever met. He came down from Memphis to live in Rose Hill and told me… he told me all kinds of things. I got a little money from a trust when my own Daddy died, see, and he told me he was gonna invest it and make us rich, so I let him. Only that fell through, so he took to drinking and… and then he wasn’t so nice anymore. Guess he finally got lucky with those scratchers.”

Harley is crying, because that’s just who he is—sensitive, a bundle of frayed nerves, empathetic to the bone. He pulls Mama into his arms and kisses her forehead while she shakes a little. “I love you,” he says quietly, like he really, _really_ means it. “I’m sorry things have been so shitty lately and we’ve been… been pulling away. It’s just so hard.” 

Suddenly Mama’s the one holding _him._ She strokes his curls back and nods like she understands. “That’s okay, baby, you take your time. I’ll be right here when you’re ready.”

And that’s when Ariel sobs. She just can’t _help it_ anymore, can’t hold it in any longer. She drops the stem of her strawberry and covers her face with her hands so they don’t see her bawling like a baby, but they still reach for her anyways. 

Ariel grabs onto her Mama this time. She doesn’t plan on letting go. 

“What is it, Twink?”

And _God,_ what _isn’t_ it? It’s Cassie being three thousand miles away and Daddy being a jackass and hell, it’s even _Peter_ being gone. Sure, they hadn’t been as close as him and Gwen were, but he was still a fun guy to play Kahoot with and always helped her with her math homework. 

Everything is all fucked up and all she wants to do is scream, but crying is probably the next best thing. 

She shakes her head because there’s no point in ranting about it all when nothing can be done. Mama seems to understand that, though, and just holds her until the bad feelings pass. Ariel had forgotten what this felt like. Weak and hot-cheeked, she tucks her face into the crook of her mother’s neck and lets herself be gently rocked back and forth. 

The love clicks right back into place like all it needed was a kick to the tuchus. Ariel finds herself smiling despite everything. 

“ _Mama,”_ she whispers, delirious with relief. 

Mama pulls away and brushes Ariel’s hair from her face. She’s got all this warmth in her eyes, and they crinkle at the corner when she smiles back. 

“You’re alright, baby,” she says, and somehow the fact that it comes from her mouth makes it true. 

Harley pushes up from the table. He has to lean down to give them both a kiss. “I’ve gotta be up early tomorrow,” he says.

“Night, Harley,” they chorus, and watch him jog up the stairs to his room. 

Ariel wipes her cheeks dry. Then she stands. “I should probably go to bed, too. Thanks for the strawberries, Mama.”

Mama just grins. “Anytime.”

It’s as Ariel is gripping the banister, one foot on the first stair, that she asks, “We both know the real reason he left, don’t we?”

Mama frowns now. “Pardon?”

“It’s ’cuz he found out he’s not my daddy,” Ariel states. “Right?”

Her mama’s eyes widen, but before she can really flip out, Ariel goes back over. She leans down and kisses her cheek. “It’s okay, Mama. I’m glad he isn’t.”

“Ariel—”

“Really, it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to be sure. G’night.”

* * *

Ashley shows up at MJ’s office with two pints of pistachio ice cream and an apology for being so MIA. 

“Well, not as MIA as _some_ people I could name.”

MJ closes her eyes for a brief moment so she doesn’t actually scream. She closes her office door after Ashley invites herself inside. “Please don’t start.”

“Oh what, so you’re suddenly not mad at him anymore?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then what’s wrong? Because if you want me to avoid the topic altogether I totally will, but it’s probably not like, the healthiest thing to do.”

MJ groans and lowers herself onto the couch against the wall. “I don’t know how I feel anymore, okay? I’m just tired _all the damn time.”_

It’s true. Her feet hurt, her back is starting to ache, her boobs are swollen. Everything sucks. She’s got stretch marks on her stomach and she’s crying all the time and getting pissed off for absolutely no reason. Between the hormones, the cravings, and the fact that she still doesn’t even know if her baby is actually _okay_ or not, she is decidedly not having a good time. 

Ashely stares at her. Then she claps her hands together and reaches for the nearest legal pad, ripping the notes MJ had been taking off to start fresh. “Tell you what: we’ll clear everything up by breaking it down into pieces.”

“But I—” 

“Shh, trust me. Okay: abs, that’s a pro—”

“Wait, are you making a _pros and cons_ list about my ex-boyfriend?”

“Well what the fuck _else_ would I do? Now, he’s got the whole superhero thing going for him, that’s a pro. How’s the sex?”

“I _don’t_ wanna talk about that.”

“That either means it’s really good or really bad.”

“ _Ashley—”_

“Does being the father of your unborn baby go in the pros or cons section?”

“Dude, what the fuck kind of question—?”

“You’re right, I’ll just put it in both.”

“Look, _none_ of this bullshit matters,” MJ snaps, snatching the stupid legal pad away. “He’s not here right now. I don’t know if he’s okay or if he’s in danger, or if he’s _ever_ gonna come back—I mean, he’s not the type of guy to just dip but like, I said _awful_ shit to him and I really, _really_ think he was getting so fucking sick of his life—”

“MJ,” Ashley says, putting her hands on MJ’s shoulders, “hey, calm down. Just breathe.”

“I can’t. I _can’t._ ”

“Yes you can. You’re Michelle fucking Jones. You can do fucking _anything,_ okay? You’re kind of my role model, as embarrassing as that is for me to say out loud. I’ve never met anyone stronger than you.”

MJ sucks in a sharp breath and holds it there, trying really, really hard not to cry. And then… 

And then she breathes. 

“See? Not so hard. You can do this without him.”

“Breathing?”

“No, dummy. _This._ The baby. Being a mom. Besides, single motherhood is totally the shit.”

MJ shakes her head. “No. Nope. No way. I can’t raise this kid on my own—”

“Why not?”

“My mom raised me on my own and she got so desperate for help she married a sociopathic douchebag that tried to kill me _twice!_ ”

Ashley blinks. “Jesus.”

“Exactly!”

“But that’s so circumstantial! You’d never pull that shit! You’re way smarter than your mom, you know?”

“I got knocked up at twenty-two and my boyfriend left me. I’m _not_ smarter.” 

“So fuck him! You don’t need a man!”

“God, I want people to stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Trashing him,” MJ says. “Acting like he’s a villain. He doesn’t even _know_ that I’m pregnant. As far as he knows, we’re broken up and that’s it! And saying I don’t need him is like saying I don’t need oxygen, okay? I _do._ I need him. I _miss_ him. I want him to be a part of this baby’s life and I don’t—God, I’m just so, _so_ fucking tired of trying to justify the way I feel to people who can’t understand.”

Ashley leans back, mollified. “Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“If he were here right now, what would he say?”

MJ presses her palms into her eyes and shakes her head, sniffing. “I don’t… he wouldn’t say anything. He would just hold me.”

“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”

And then she’s wrapping her arms around MJ and pulling her close, gathering her all up to hold. MJ breaks then, and cries harder than she’s let herself in months. Everything hurts and aches and it’s all fucked up and not going the way it’s supposed to. 

But at least she’s not alone. 

* * *

When she gets back to the apartment that night, May is reading a thrashed paperback on MJ’s bed. She looks exhausted and she’s a quarter deep into a bottle of red wine. 

“ _Madonna mia,_ you scared the shit out of me,” she says, when MJ raps on her own door frame. May clutches her chest and takes a deep breath. “How was work?”

“Shitty,” MJ says. “What about you?”

“About the same.”

MJ drops her bag and flops onto the bed. Her hand drifts to her stomach and May’s eyes follow, one brow flicking up. 

“It keeps moving around,” MJ reports. “It’s like that feeling you get when you’re on a rollercoaster and it drops.”

May’s lip twitches. “So I’ve been told.”

“Are nosebleeds normal? I got one today.”

“They are, unfortunately. And gum bleeding, and heartburn.”

MJ frowns. “Nobody ever tells girls about this stuff.”

“Believe me, I’ve been pissed at the lack of proper health education for a long time now.” May leans back against the pillows and pats her thigh, so MJ complies by curling up next to her and using her lap as a pillow. May’s fingers run over her braids. “Did you know that your ribs expand and change shape during pregnancy?”

MJ blinks. “I did not know that.”

May laughs. “Everyone glorifies it so much, but it can actually be really hard on the body. Don’t feel guilty if you feel bad, okay? It’s normal to be a little irritated with the way things are right now.”

MJ nods. 

She’s quiet for a long time and so May goes back to reading, probably assuming she’s fallen asleep. But something’s been gnawing at MJ since Ashley stopped by and she finally bucks up the courage to say, “I really, really miss him.”

May’s hands pause. She slowly lowers her book. “Me too.”

“I know,” MJ nods, eyes starting to burn—God, she’s so sick of crying all the time. “I just… I spent all this time being angry and worried and now I… I don’t know what to feel except _sad._ I keep thinking about all the good stuff and everything he’s missing out on and I’m—I’m _scared,_ too. I don’t wanna do this alone, you know? And I know I have you and Pepper and Tony and stuff, but it’s not the same. I just—I literally had a nightmare the other night that he just randomly showed up and the baby was like _seven_ and I—”

She stops because her throat is so thick it’s getting hard to talk. May grabs her hand though, and squeezes. “He’ll come home.”

“But what if he doesn’t?”

“MJ,” May says, firm now, “he will _come home_ or I’ll sell my soul to the devil just to track him down and kick his ass, okay?”

“But what if something is _wrong?”_ MJ demands, distressed now and sitting up to face May. “What if he _can’t_ come back? What if he’s—” she stops. Closes her eyes. The words come out in a whisper: “What if he’s dead, May?”

She hasn’t said it yet. She hasn’t even let herself think it.

May sits up straighter and puts her hands on either side of MJ’s face. She wipes the tears away. “He’s not dead.”

“But what if he is?”

“ _Michelle—”_

“ _May,”_ MJ counters in a sob, “we don’t _know._ You can’t just _say_ he’s not dead, that’s not how it works.”

May looks like she wants to throw up, like someone is twisting her insides like they’re wringing out a wet rag. “We’ll figures that out when the time comes.”

“When is it time?” MJ whispers. 

“I—” May shakes her head, helpless. “I don’t know. But I think—I think we’ll know. Not yet, though. I can’t give up on my baby, yet.”

MJ nods. She sucks in a deep, sharp breath and wipes her face with her shirt sleeve. “Was it hard to do alone?”

“Raise him? God, yes.” At MJ’s expression, she shrugs. “I’m not gonna sugarcoat it for you, kiddo, it was rough. I didn’t expect my life to go that way, you know? It’s _different_ when you’re doing it alone. It’s just you and them and… it’s just different. More intense. And after Ben… Geez, that kid, though. Oh my god. He did his best to make it easy and I loved him so much for it.”

MJ criss-crosses her legs. “He did that for me too, but I _hated it._ I used to get so mad because all I wanted was for him to open up to me, but instead he hid all his problems and tried to act like he was fine for my sake.” She snorts. “I say this as if he actually broke the habit, like he wasn’t still doing it until the night before he took off.”

May hums. “Ben was kind of the opposite. He wore his heart on his sleeve. God, he was so emotional. He cried all the time, but he laughed more. I loved his laugh.”

MJ looks down at her lap. It’s not hard to remember the sound of Peter’s laugh; she listens to it at least three times a week when she plays those old messages or watches stupid videos she’d taken over the years. 

She gnaws at her cheek and lies back down. May’s hand falls back against her head like it belongs there. 

“I had a lot of reasons to love him,” she says dismally. “I mean, I’ve heard Ashley’s horror stories. I know how bad some guys can be. It’s not all that often you find one that actually holds your hair back when you’re throwing up or brings you soup when you’re sick, or makes you laugh right after your step dad kicked the shit out of you—I mean Jesus, how did he even do that? I still don’t know, but I do know it’s when I decided I loved him more than anyone else in the whole world. I know he made me feel safe and I know that— _oh._ ”

She sits up sharply, hand flying to her stomach. Her heart is pounding in her ears. She stays perfectly still for five whole seconds, until she feels it again: a sharp jab against her abdomen, more concentrated than the rolling sensations she’s been feeling for a few weeks now. 

“What is it?”

“Feel, feel,” MJ says, grabbing May’s hand to press against her belly. 

When it happens again she realises they’re both grinning. “That’s a _kick,”_ she says, happier than she’s felt in months. “Oh my god, it has _legs._ ”

MJ looks down at her stomach in wonderment. “Wow. Legs. _Feet,_ May. Holy shit.”

May laughs. “See? I told you everything would be okay.”

MJ bites her lip. She can only hope it lasts.

* * *

“Honey bunches?”

“Yes, dear?”

MJ rolls her eyes and shakes the box of cereal. “Don’t be an asshole. This or something else?”

Harley groans. “I still don’t understand _why_ we can’t just get Lucky Charms like I wanted in the first place.”

“Because they’re unhealthy as fuck, that’s why. The girls need something with actual nutrition if you’re gonna keep stress baking and forcing them to eat all of your cakes and shit.”

“I don’t _force_ anyone to eat _anything,”_ Harley says. “I leave it out on the counter and blink and when I open my eyes it’s gone.”

MJ rolls her eyes. She drops the box of cereal into the cart and then grabs another—shredded wheat—and chucks that in, too. 

“Ew? Ew. Absolutely disgusting. For why.”

“For _me,”_ MJ says. “I’ve been craving them like crazy.”

“I don’t trust people who eat shredded wheat. You might as well swallow a bunch of razor blades.”

MJ pinches the bridge of her nose. “Why are you the way that you are?”

He flashes her a beaming smile. “My mama raised me to express my opinions, ma’am.” 

“Jesus, don’t call me ma’am.” 

She falters at the end of her sentence and her hand flies to her stomach, feeling the flurry of kicks that comes, incessant. “What an attention whore,” MJ mutters with a grin. “Okay: funions.”

“Did it tell you what it wants via morse code or do you just use the bump itself as a homing beacon? I’m genuinely curious.”

MJ would throw something at him if she had anything to throw, she really would. As it is, she flips him the bird over her shoulder and leads the way to the snack aisle. 

* * *

When Ariel gets home from training with Rogers, she finds an empty house. 

That’s been happening more and more lately; Harley keeps staying late at work and Charlie’s been spending every weekend at MJ and May’s. Mama usually doesn’t clock out until around eight at night, either, so there’s not even food to eat. 

It sucks, but she’s getting used to it and even finding herself starting to enjoy the quiet. Ariel drops her bag by the door, kicks off her shoes, and jogs up the stairs to her room. 

Only, it’s not empty. 

“Cassie,” Ariel breathes. “Oh my god, _Cassie.”_

She practically tackles her and they both go rolling onto the bed, but Ariel doesn’t care and Cassie is laughing anyway. Ariel can’t believe it. “I thought you weren’t coming until winter break?”

“My mom changed her mind,” Cassie says happily. “Said she was sick of me moping around the house, so she set everything up with my dad and Tony. Hi, by the way.”

“Hi,” Ariel says stupidly. 

Cassie grins. “Are you gonna get off of me or…?”

And just like that Ariel finds her smile fading and her stomach swooping. It’s a complete accident when her gaze flits to Cassie’s mouth; she’s just _thinking,_ is all. 

“I—yeah, sorry—”

Cassie kisses her. 

Cassie kisses her and she tastes like cherries and her lips are soft and it’s every bit as fucking _perfect_ as Ariel imagined it would be, except it’s more because she never took the time to think about what it would be like to have Cassie’s hands in her hair, or what Cassie would look like when she pulled away—wide-eyed, flushed, slowly starting to smirk. 

Ariel makes a tiny, pathetic squeaking sound. “Ma’am?” she says, stupidly. 

Cassie laughs. “Sorry, I just…” her gaze turns impossibly soft and she pushes one of Ariel’s still-damp curls behind her ear. “I’ve just wanted to do that for a while.”

“Oh?”

Cassie snorts. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“I’m not being an asshole, I just didn’t realise my pathetic pining was mutual.”

“Well, I apologise for leaving you hanging until now, but I _was_ across the country for over six months.”

“A valid excuse if I ever heard one.”

Cassie laughs. _God,_ she has the prettiest laugh. Ariel is gonna go fucking _nuts._ “Okay seriously, get off, I wanna watch Victorious.”

“Gremlin,” Ariel says, rolling off. “The audacity of you to _not_ wanna watch Big Time Rush.”

“Oh _God,_ don’t start with that shit again. Where’s your laptop?”

* * *

“It’s his birthday.”

Tony doesn’t look up from the engine he’s been fiddling with to de-stress. “I know.”

MJ sets down her bag and walks toward him, settling on a nearby stool. “What are you doing?”

“Replacing the ignition coil.”

“Really? That’s your priority right now?”

Tony sighs. He’d figured this was coming. “Well considering I’ve been up since five in the morning and I spent a good seven hours trying to figure out your baby situation—to no avail, I might add—and then had to deal with fucking _Ross_ riding my ass about my kid, threatening to hunt him down and throw him in the Raft if he finds out Peter stepped one _foot_ on foreign soil—which I mean, good fucking luck—I figured I could take a few minutes to clear my head doing something simple.”

MJ stares. “Ross threatened to throw him in the Raft?”

Tony shakes his head. “It’s not happening, believe me. If _I_ can’t find the kid, there’s no way that shithead is getting his hands on him.”

“But how do you know—”

“Because all signs point to the fact that Peter is deliberately keeping under the radar,” Tony says, pulling away from the engine and grabbing a rag to wipe the grease from his hands with. “If he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be.”

“So that’s it?” she asks, kind of testily. “There’s just nothing we can do?”

Tony’s shoulders fall. He feels sick. “Yeah, kid. That’s it.”

MJ’s lips press into a thin line. She looks away like she simply can’t bear the sight of him, which is pretty understandable. He can’t even stand looking in the mirror these days. 

“Okay,” she says after a minute or so. “Okay.”

Then she nods to herself, rises, and gets halfway across the room before she turns back around. “No, you know what? It’s not okay. This is _ridiculous._ He’s been gone for _four fucking months_ and what have we done? Sat around and worried?”

“Well what do you wanna do instead?” Tony demands. “What do you propose? Tell me, please, because I don’t fucking know! I have _nothing_ to go on! No leads, no locations! You think I’m not trying already? You think I haven’t implemented facial recognition software? You think I’m not doing everything in my power to try to find my son? I’m _trying_ here, but it’s like trying to find a solution to a problem with no variables, okay? There’s nothing to work with here! There’s nothing to bounce off of, nothing, nadda, zilch—”

He stops talking.

She’s hugging him.

They’ve never hugged before. 

Tony is awkward about embracing her back. He feels stiff at first but then relaxes, closing his eyes and sighing. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” she says, small and muffled against his shoulder.

“That’s okay.”

MJ sniffs a little and pulls back. “I just… I hate feeling like this. Helpless, I mean. It’s like—everyone knows about the whole responsibility thing, but they don’t get that he thinks _everything_ is his responsibility. No matter what he’s dealing with or how much crap is on his plate, he still puts everyone else first. It’s just who he is, but _no one_ has enough great power to deal with that. That’s why he’s _my_ responsibility. If he dies…” she trails off and shakes her head, eyes shining, “if he dies, that’s on me.” 

Despite everything, Tony feels his lip quirk up. “You’re not the only one who feels that way, you know.”

“Yeah,” she nods, “I know.”

Tony sits down heavily on the stool she’d vacated. “How are you feeling? Have you been counting the kicks like I asked you to?”

“Ten movements every two hours,” she confirms, “but usually it’s more than that.”

“Good, that’s good. Just make sure to call me if they ever slow down, okay? We need to do everything we can to ensure the baby’s developing normally outside of fetal scans.”

“I know,” MJ says. “I just… this is gonna sound stupid, but I really just wanna know if it’s a boy or a girl.”

“Hey, for all we know it could be _both._ You haven’t ever felt four feet at once, have you?” 

MJ snorts. “No, just the two. Pretty sure there’s only one goblin growing inside me.” 

Tony shrugs. “You never know. I’m buying you two cribs just in case.”

“Oh Jesus, Stark, don’t—”

“No, it’s too late, I already made you a registry and bought everything on it. I’ll just double everything.”

MJ laughs, and it’s a good sound—a little bit like hope, like happiness. 

Tony’s gonna hold onto it for as long as possible.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

TWO MONTHS EARLIER 

The ground is hard beneath his back and cold to the touch. 

Peter has trouble opening his eyes. They’re heavy and they feel as if they’ve been glued shut. 

When he finally manages it, he doesn’t expect what he sees: the night sky, black and gaping wide open to unleash a flurry of snow. The flakes land on his face and melt against his skin. They catch in his eyelashes and hair as he slowly sits up.

There’s no pain. He’s not injured that he can see or feel. 

“Strange,” he says to himself, examining his hands. “Pretty sure I’m supposed to look like a burnt chicken nugget right about now, but go off I guess.”

“You don’t have to worry about that yet,” says a voice to his right. 

Peter’s head whips around and his mouth parts in shock, eyes widening. He slowly stands, carefully so as not to slip on the ice, and watches the shadowed figure at the edge of the rink approach. 

Richard Parker smiles. “Hey, Peanut Butter Pants.”


	5. dad & son

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello folks sorry it’s been like three weeks KJSDKJDF OOPS
> 
> life got in the way :((
> 
> anyway i hope it’s not ass!!

  
“Holy shit? Holy _shit.”_

Richard Parker’s grin widens. He doesn’t look anything like Peter, really, but _God_ if he doesn’t look like Ben. 

A smaller, twinkier version of Ben, sure, but Ben all the same. 

“Hey, kid,” Richard says. He tilts his head to the side to consider Peter, hands tucked into the pockets of his ratty jeans. “Fancy seeing you here.” 

He then abruptly sits down on the ice and pats the spot beside him, and Peter figures he might as well take him up on the invitation. “Rockefeller Centre?” he asks. 

“This is where I proposed to your mother,” Richard tells him, angling his head back to view the chasmic black sky. “I uh, didn’t know we’d end up here. I’ve never done this sort of thing before, see, but Ben told me it can be real draining. He said we probably wouldn’t have much time.”

“Makes sense,” Peter supposes. “So why me? Why not Mary, I mean?” 

At that, Richard’s eyes darken. He lowers his head to scratch the nape of his neck. “I can’t see her.”

“Why not?”

“I blocked her out. You can do that, y’know: make it so you can’t be called by someone. Anyway, I didn’t… I knew that if she saw me, she’d never wanna leave me. That sort of thing can be real dangerous.”

Peter stares for a good few seconds and rips his gaze away, turning it onto the golden Prometheus statue instead. It looks almost alive with all those lights dancing across the metal. 

“I don’t know what to make of her,” he admits softly. 

Richard clicks his tongue. “Yeah, no one ever did. She’s fun and unique that way.”

At that Peter starts to laugh, and when he laughs Richard does, too. It’s ridiculous—they’re sitting here in an echo of whatever New York Richard knew, side by side on the ice, and despite everything, Peter feels at ease. 

He doesn’t remember Richard Parker, but the feeling of being around him is familiar: like a warm blanket in the dead of winter, or the sun breaking over the horizon and melting the early morning frost. Like the bad things don’t matter, like the nightmares are over. It’s a blind, juvenile reassurance ingrained in Peter from childhood. 

Then Richard says, “I wanted to see you when you came before so badly, but I didn’t think it was the right time. God, look at you. You’re a real human adult now.”

“Time’ll do that to you,” Peter tells him quietly. He looks at Richard—really looks, noting the scar on his upper lip and the way his eyes are brown, but not the same shade of brown as Peter’s; the crooked nose, the _Periodic Table of Star Wars_ t-shirt, the beat up chucks on his feet. He isn’t a day over twenty-seven. 

“Why now?”

“You’re in danger,” Richard answers automatically. “All of you are. These next few months… they’re gonna be hard, Peter. Things are gonna get a lot worse than they already have been, but you have to pull through or you’ll never get to the good part, okay? And listen: if it comes down to it—to you or her—choose you, got it? It’s what she’d want.”

“Wait wait wait,” Peter puts his hands in a time-out position and turns so they’re fully facing one another, “you’re asking me to kill her?”

“I’m saying if they make you choose—”

“They? Who’s ‘they’?!” 

Richard hesitates. “You’ll find out as soon as you wake up.”

“Why can’t you just tell me now?”

“It’s not my _place,”_ Richard says sharply. “Even if I wanted to, even if I tried, you wouldn’t hear me. Some things you’re just not allowed to know until you know them. I can’t manipulate the timeline of events when it’s already been sequenced as Fate sees fit—”

“What the _fuck_ does that even mean?”

Richard sucks in a deep breath and holds it for a second, eyes closed. Then, “God, you’re just like your mother. No, I take it back, you’re worse.”

Peter opens his mouth in affront and starts to argue, but Richard talks over him like it’s something he’s used to. “I need you to know that whatever she does next, it’s not _her._ She loves you more than anything in the world, okay? If I’m right, you might not even need to worry, but I just had to tell you in case… in case they’re smarter about it this time.”

Peter feels his lips twist into a frown. He massages his temples, mind racing a mile a minute. “I don’t understand the point of coming to see me if all you were gonna do was be ominous and vague.”

Richard smiles softly. “You’ll understand everything soon, I promise. And Peter?”

“Yeah?”

Richard reaches for him. His hand closes around Peter’s forearm, right over the hourglass symbol hidden beneath the sleeve of his shirt. His face is earnest now, cracked wide open. 

“Don’t let them break you like they broke her.” 

Peter’s breath catches in his throat. He shakes his head a little to clear it, but it doesn’t help. “What do you mean, Richard?”

Richard winces at the sound of his own name, probably because the last time Peter had ever addressed him, he’d called him ‘Dad’. 

“You just gotta stay strong, understand me? Because if they get inside your head...” Richard looks a little sick now, “if they get inside your head, there’s no telling what you’ll be capable of.” 

And Peter is already starting to parcel out the meaning behind the other man’s words, already reading between the lines, and the dread is pooling in his stomach and his heart is beating faster, and then with one final squeeze of his arm, Richard is gone. 

Everything is gone. 

There’s only pain.

* * *

Peter is shocked awake.

Like, literally shocked. It takes him a few delirious seconds to realise that’s what he’s just experienced: an electrically induced convulsion that leaves his nerves frayed and his heart pounding so hard it feels like it’s slamming against his sternum in a vain attempt to get free. 

His vision had whited out, but he slowly regains it as he comes-to. 

The air smells burnt. His hands twitch and spasm. His jaw aches and his head is throbbing so hard it feels like it’s about to pop like a watermelon under pressure. 

“Is he conscious?” someone to his right asks.

“Yes, sir,” says someone to his left. The voices are both male, but the guy closest to him—black hair, shaking hands, clothed in white scrubs—is far younger. 

Peter grunts and tries to grab at him, but finds he can’t raise his arms. “ _Wuzgoinun?”_

“Mr. Parker,” greets the older man from somewhere behind Peter’s head, “how do you feel?”

Peter tries to find the speaker but can’t. He blinks and struggles to move again, but his body won’t work right. Everything is fading in and out like a radio with bad reception. 

“There was a woman,” Peter says suddenly, voice too slurred to convey the urgency he feels, “there was a woman with me and she’s super duper dangerous—”

“You’re right,” agrees the older man. 

Then he leans over Peter. 

“She is dangerous,” Thaddeus Ross says. “And so are you.” 

Peter stares for a good, solid five seconds. Then, “Oh, you’ve gotta be shitting me.”

“It’s nice to see you, too.” 

Peter shakes his head. Ridiculous, this is absolutely ridiculous. He doesn’t have _time_ for this shit, he has things to do—urgent matters to attend, mothers to de-brainwash (unbrainwash?). 

In light of this new information, Peter attempts to actually sit up. That’s when he realises the reason he couldn’t move wasn’t just temporary numbness from being defibrillated.

He’s in restraints. 

He was shocked for _funsies._

Peter feels an unearthly amount of pure, unadulterated _outrage_ boil up and over in the pit of his stomach. He moves with it, and by all logic his super strength should allow him to break the cuffs keeping him pinned to the bed he’s lying on, but they don’t budge.

“What the fuck,” he deadpans.

Ross chuckles a little. He circles around so that he and Peter can talk face to face like civilised people. “They’re made of vibranium.”

“Bullshit.”

“I assure you it’s not, but you can go right on ahead and keep trying to break them. It’s no skin off my back.”

Peter looks from Ross to the guy in scrubs, only to find that _that_ guy is readying a syringe full of some kind of amber liquid. “Hey man,” Peter says, “what the hell.”

“Hmm? Oh, that’s Cooper,” says Ross. “He’s one of our medical attendants. You’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the coming weeks.”

Peter whips around. “Pardon?”

“You heard me.” Ross slips his hands into the pockets of his trousers and considers Peter with a smile. “Geez, I still can’t get over my luck. With the way people talk about you, I never thought I’d actually be lucky enough to get my hands on you, y’know? Not to mention the other three. But then I landed all four of you in _one go?_ I mean, come on, I might as well have won the damn lottery.”

Peter squints. He looks back at Cooper the Medical Attendant. “What the fuck is he talking about?” 

Cooper doesn’t reply. He injects the needle right into Peter’s central IV line. “This’ll feel a little cold,” he says quietly. 

And it does, but in a way that burns—like it’s so hot Peter’s body can’t figure out what to make of it, like his receptors are fried. 

Ross leans over him again. “That’s gonna paralyse you from the neck down,” he announces casually. “You’ll still be able to use your respiratory system, though, so it’ll allow us to talk without fear of interruption.”

Peter shakes his head. He can already feel the effects starting to take hold. His legs are heavy now like they don’t even belong on his body. What the fuck. What in the absolute _fuck_ is going on?!

“What’s your game, Ross?”

“My game? I don’t have a game. I have an _objective,_ Mr. Parker, there’s a difference.”

“Please, you’ve paralysed me, call me Peter.”

Ross’ lip twitches. “You really are your father’s son, aren’t you?”

Peter doesn’t bother answering that. He turns his head away—his neck now being the only part of his body he can actually move—and glares at Cooper. “So you’re just gonna go along with this shit? Seriously? How much is he paying you? Because I’ll double it. Does he have dirt on you? I can make that go away, too—”

Cooper is looking from Peter to Ross, suddenly frantic. 

“Out!” Ross snaps. “ _Get out!”_

Cooper scrambles out of the cell. He has to scan his hand to do so, and after the door shuts behind him there’s a sickening sound of some kind of barrier lock sliding into place. 

Jesus, this whole thing… this whole thing was planned. 

“Am I in the Raft?”

“No. That would be far too obvious, and I no longer trust its security system after Stark hacked into it.”

“So where am I?”

“Why would I tell you that?” asks Ross laughingly. “You don’t need to know, anyway. No one is coming for you, kid. No one knows you’re here and there’s absolutely nowhere to go, I can promise you that.”

Peter shakes his head. “Don’t call me ‘kid’.”

“ _That’s_ your point of contention?”

“Oh believe me, I have many points of contention—one of which being: are you absolutely fucking _insane?”_

“No,” Ross says simply. “But I am curious by nature, always have been. Lately I’ve been curious about you. Or, your abilities more specifically. Your _capabilities._ And I’ll tell you something else, Mr. Parker: I don’t like chaos. That’s why I’ve fought so hard to implement the Accords. Hell, it’s why I became the secretary of defense in the first place. I like _order,_ I like _discipline._ You—you and your family, that is—are just about the most undisciplined, unpredictable group of people I have ever encountered in my entire life. You’re wild cards that I can’t afford to keep reigning in.

“I haven’t been sleeping well lately, Mr. Parker, and I’ll tell you why that is: it’s because I can’t stop worrying when the next Sokovia will be, or the next civil war. The Avengers are dangerous down to their DNA, but your worst fault is how erratic and unstable you all are.”

He pauses. Scratches his chin casually. “So I got to thinking and narrowed it down to two options. I could either, a) somehow manage to kill you all off and make it look like an accident, or b) change your way of thinking.”

Peter doesn’t even have the energy to glare anymore. “Change my way of thinking?” 

Ross hums, nodding. “As I mentioned, I’m a curious guy. I started reading about HYDRA after Romanoff leaked those files, and it really got my gears turning. I thought, _what if I could do that?_ What if I could take one of you—volatile and impulsive and reckless as you are—and turn you into a _real American soldier?”_

Peter doesn’t need to feel it to know that his stomach is in his ass right about now. “That’s gotta be a rhetorical question. Tell me it’s rhetorical, please? Tell me you know how stupid and impossible that is?”

“Impossible?” Ross scoffs. “It was done to Barnes. It was done to your mother—yes, that’s right, I know all about her. They were two of the world’s most efficient assassins. Hell, they were so good some people didn’t even believe Barnes _existed,_ and _no one_ knew about your mother. In and out, no mess.” Ross shakes his head, feverish with excitement now. “Think how our country could benefit from that.”

Peter opens his mouth. Closes it. 

“You need to fire your maid.”

Ross blinks. “Pardon?”

“I’m serious. I think she accidentally switched out your sugar with a bunch of cocaine, man. You should really get on that.”

“Oh, for the love of God…” Ross runs a tired hand down his face and sighs. “It’s gonna take a hell of a lot to wipe you clean, isn’t it?”

And Peter has a lot of dislikes in life. He dislikes food that jiggles like it can’t decide which direction to slide in, he dislikes mint ice cream, he dislikes early morning runs and people who don’t use coasters and baby poop.

He dislikes. He doesn’t _hate._

But God, he _hates_ that. He really, really does. That is wretched and gross and very, very ew. He would like to wake up from whatever fucked up nightmare this is, please and thanks. 

Ross is moving. He goes over to the door and pounds on it. It groans as it slides open, and Peter strains his neck to see that it’s at least six inches thick and probably made of the same metal cuffed around his wrists. 

There’s an armed guard right outside who leans in to listen to Ross. A minute later Cooper returns. 

“We’re done for now,” Ross says. “Sedate him until the morning.”

* * *

The next time he wakes up, he’s choking. 

It takes him a few seconds to realise he’s underwater and by that time his body has already reacted; thrashing and struggling against the grip of the hands holding him down, the weight against his back, but to no avail.

Just when his chest starts to burn and ache like his respiratory system is at risk of collapse, he’s jerked up and out of the ice-cold tub. 

Peter coughs out a lungful of water and gasps, sagging forward onto his knees. He retches, throat on fire. “Fucking _ow.”_

He can’t even support himself. His hands are secured behind his back. Someone grabs a fistful of his hair and tilts his head up and—

“Ross,” Peter says as it all comes back to him: where he is, what’s going on. “Howdy-do.”

Ross grunts and lets go, visibly disgusted. “Mr. Parker. How do you feel?”

“Shredded, but you did just waterboard me.”

Ross squints. “Elaborate on ‘shredded’ in a more medical sense.”

Peter squints back. “What the fuck are you even saying?” he demands. “Why would I do that when I know you’re just trying to figure out how to fucking—dismantle me or whatever the hell—”

Ross punches him. It’s abrupt; Peter doesn’t see it coming and it knocks him back, pinning his arms in a painful manner that has him twisting to relieve the pressure. He spits a spray of blood against the white tile floor. “That was rude of you.”

Ross doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Instead he stares down at Peter with his head cocked to the side, studying. Then, “Get him onto the table again. Strap him down, but don’t give him any anesthesia. I wanna try something.”

The handlers grab Peter by his arms and haul him up. 

“Try what?” Peter asks wildly. “What are you—”

Someone puts something over his mouth: a kind of muzzle like the ones used on rabid dogs. Suddenly Peter literally _can’t speak_ anymore. 

This is a HYDRA tactic: render the asset completely immobile, take away their ability to articulate thought or pain, and then subject them to rounds of different kinds of torture. Psychological, physical. 

_It won’t work,_ he thinks stubbornly. 

But then again, that’s probably what Bucky thought all those years ago, too. 

* * *

Ross’ basically wants to play Operation with Peter’s body.

They strap him down like they said they would, but Peter doesn’t plan to just lie there and let this shit happen. He bangs his head against the metal gurney over and over until he sees spots, and that’s when they start with the shock therapy. 

“All you have to do is stop,” Ross says, after a good ten minutes of Peter being the world’s most stubborn asshole alive. “Just lie back and let the doctors do their work.”

Peter keeps banging his head. He’s aware that he’s bleeding, aware that he’s subjecting himself to—albeit temporary—brain damage. He doesn’t care. He’d rather die than do what they say. 

“Fuck it,” Ross snaps. “Start cutting anyway.”

And so they cut, and it fucking _hurts,_ and Peter forgets to be stubborn because there’s just so much _pain._

All he can focus on is the raw feeling along his sides, down his chest. They cut and then they sit back, starting timers to monitor how long it takes for each incision to heal. It goes on for hours. They cut some more to determine whether or not the second round of wounds will heal slower than the first, given that his body is already concentrating energy on those. Peter listens to them mutter, he hears the scratch of their pens against paper, hears their heartbeats and their blood pumping and thinks, _I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill every last one of you._

But Ross… Ross is first. 

* * *

They leave him in the dark for two days without returning. 

On the third day, Ross comes in with a metal tray of food. It doesn’t look remotely appealing, but Peter is past hungry at this point. There are still red lines on his body where the cuts were because his metabolism isn’t up to scratch; normally they’d be completely faded by now. Do they know that? Are they starving him on purpose?

Ross removes the muzzle by clicking a button on a remote. Then he sets down the folding chair he’d brought with him and regards Peter. “How are you feeling?”

“Where’s Natasha?”

Ross snorts a little. He sets the food down. “You don’t need to worry about her.”

“Yes I do,” Peter replies simply. “Where is she? Where’s Barnes?”

“You can ask me all you want, but I’m not telling,” Ross says. “It’s a secret.”

Peter closes his eyes and leans his head against the wall. He’s already so fucking tired. “You’re a sick son of a bitch, you know that?”

“So I’ve been told.”

Peter scrubs a hand down his face and stares at the sandwich for a few seconds. 

“You want it?” Ross asks.

Peter promptly responds by kicking the entire tray against the far wall. The ceramic plate shatters into shards. It leaves a tuna smear on the tile. 

“You’re difficult,” Ross assesses. “I don’t like difficult.”

“Guess you picked the wrong candidate for your project then, huh?”

At that, Ross laughs. It takes Peter by surprise. “No,” he says. “God, no. If everything works out the way I want it to, you’ll be the most efficient killing machine known to man.”

* * *

It goes like this: 

Every morning they wake him up—or at least, Peter assumes it’s morning, but there are no windows in the room they keep him inside of. 

They waterboard him on and off, use electro-shock therapy that leaves him dazed and confused, and inject him with various substances. Some leave him weaker. Some make his wounds take longer to heal. Some leave his skin burning for days on end, covered in red hives. 

They give him something that slows his metabolism to that of a normal human. Peter can tell because he hasn’t felt this sluggish since he was thirteen, and on top of that he isn’t dead yet; with the scarcity of sustenance he should be by now, but instead he’s only reached the point where he can count his ribs. 

Peter starts to forget things. There are blank spaces in his head where he knows information is supposed to go. 

He can’t remember how he got here. He knows he was with someone—someones—but he can’t remember who. 

He just knows that when he closes his eyes, he smells chamomile and jasmine. If he concentrates, if he chases the sensation, he remembers the warmth of a body in his arms and the feeling of curly hair tickling his nose with every inhale. Not minding; smiling, even. Leaning down to press his lips against the nape of her neck… 

_MJ. Emmie._

He knows her. He won’t forget her. No matter who he becomes, no matter how much of himself he loses, he’s determined to never lose the memory of holding her. 

* * *

He stops eating. 

They knock him out. Load him with fluids and insert a feeding tube. 

When he wakes up, Ross tells him that he was asleep for twenty-three days straight. 

Ross asks, “Do you know your name?”

He opens his mouth. Closes it. 

Shakes his head. 

* * *

“Peter? Peter, wake up, buddy.”

Someone is patting his cheek. Peter groans and groggily tries to bat the hand away. It’s big and calloused and somehow he just _knows—_

“Ben?”

Ben laughs. The sound is big and booming. It probably rattles the walls of the apartment and causes an earthquake in Croatia via the butterfly effect. Peter doesn’t care. He’s too fucked up to focus on anything but the big bearded dude leaning over him. 

Ben’s eyes are bright. “Hey, honey.”

“Ben,” Peter says again, just to feel the name fall out of his mouth. He grabs at Ben’s arm, at the sleeve of the Mets jersey he’s wearing. “Hi, Ben. Hi. Oh my god.”

“Relax, you weren’t half this excited to see me last time,” Ben points out as he helps Peter sit up.

“Yeah, but last time I thought I was hallucinating the entire thing and that you were just my subconscious trying to talk me out of dying,” Peter is gripping his shoulder now, vice-like, deserpate. “Also I forgot you. I’m so _sorry.”_

“Don’t you dare be sorry, you hear me? None of this is your fault, absolutely _none_ of it.”

Still Ben accepts the arms Peter wraps around his body. He holds him and rubs his back through the shaky breaths Peter barely manages.

“Peter,” Ben whispers softly, rocking them back and forth a little like he always did before, “oh, kid. My little idiot. _I’m_ sorry.” 

Peter’s fists ball against Ben’s shirt. His eyes burn and his breath hitches. “I don’t know what’s _happening to me._ ”

“Look at me,” Ben leans back to take Peter’s face in his hands. It makes Peter feel like a little kid again—like Ben’s giving him another pep talk after a bully, like he’s really safe here with his uncle. Ben thumbs away the dampness on Peter’s cheeks. “Richie told you it was gonna be hard, but I worried you didn’t realise… now you know. God, I wish there was something more I could do. I’d sell my own soul if it meant I could save you, but they told me it wasn’t an even trade. Said that’d be like trying to exchange a Walmart knock off for a real Gucci belt.”

And despite everything, Peter laughs. “I’m assuming you’re the Gucci belt in this scenario?”

Ben’s expression softens. He pushes Peter’s hair from his eyes. It’s gotten too long. He’ll need to get it cut when this is all over. 

It’s easy to think about things like that here in the ghost of their old Forest Hills apartment—the one Peter hasn’t set foot in for years, the one with the scratches on the wall that marked his growth spurts, and the oven that always refused to light unless you cracked the door. He’s tricked into believing that he can actually relax here, that he’s saved, that he’s home. 

“Peter,” Ben says, just to say it. His lip twitches up. “I know you’ve got a mouth bigger than the South China Sea, but the only way you’re gonna make it out of this alive is if you keep your trap shut, okay?”

“But it’s just so _hard_ when the guy sucks so much, you know?”

Ben laughs. “Yeah, I know, but you’re gonna have to give him what he wants, kid.”

Peter’s brow furrows. “What do you mean? Like give up? Let him turn me into the next Winter Soldier? I’d hate to think of the shit name they come up with for me.” He snorts, “all will tremble in the shadow of the Spider Monkey.”

Ben raps his knuckles against Peter’s forehead like he’s trying to bang a candy bar out of the vending machine that is Peter’s brain. “Stay on topic, would you? We don’t have tons of time here. Now: you’ll have to fake it...”

* * *

The next time Peter wakes up, he feels the way a new phone must after it’s had a cloud backup restored. He remembers everything, remembers his date of birth and the city where he was born and the answers to all of his other password security questions. Even stranger, he can still recall the feeling of _not_ knowing and _not_ remembering. His whole life had been like a forgotten word on the tip of his tongue or a celebrity he couldn’t quite place a name to the face of. 

Cooper is shining a flashlight in his eyes. “Dilation is normal,” he calls over his shoulder. “He’s conscious.”

“Soldier,” says Ross, walking briskly toward the table, “can you tell me your name?”

Peter pretends to think about it. He shakes his head. Ross seems satisfied. Still he leans over him and asks, “The year? Your mother’s maiden name?”

_2024\. Potts. Fuck you._

“No, I don’t…”

“That’s alright, don’t think too hard on it.” 

And then Ross smiles, and it makes Peter’s stomach turn. _Oh joy,_ he thinks, _here we go._

* * *

It’s May who opens the door to the apartment when Tony knocks, her hair falling out of its braid, flour on her cheek and dusting her blouse. “Tony,” she greets, and promptly yanks him inside.

“I—ow—hey, May.”

“Oh, yeah right,” May says, out of breath for whatever reason. “Listen, I love the kid, don’t get me wrong, but you have _got_ to take her or _talk_ to her or _something.”_

“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

May shakes her head as she leads him deeper inside. “She threw a little tantrum last night after MJ went to bed and I took care of it. I thought she’d calmed down, but she’s been _haywire_ since she woke up this morning. She’s been screaming and sobbing on and off for hours. I think she tired herself out, though—”

“Where is she?!” Tony demands urgently. 

“In her room,” May says. “I’m worried, okay? I mean, I know Peter was practically an angel sent from heaven, but he threw the occasional fit, you know? I just… I’ve _never_ seen one like that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony nods, “I’ll be back.”

With that he walks the rest of the way on his own, hesitating outside of Morgan’s door before taking a deep breath and ducking inside. 

There’s no one in view. “Morgan?”

“Go _away,”_ comes a miserable moan from somewhere near the floor. Tony quickly deduces that she’s crawled under the bed to pout. 

He grunts a little as he gets on his knees and then lies down on his stomach. Morgan’s on her back, picking at the mattress poking through the wooden slats holding it in place. 

“Morgan,” Tony says again, “honey, please look at me?”

“I don’t want to,” she snaps. “I don’t like you, okay?! So just go _away.”_

And Tony would be lying if he said he wasn’t hurt by that—like, he’s had some pretty fucked up shit thrown his way, had his name dragged through the mud by tabloids, been chewed out by Rhodey one too many times—but God, that cuts deep. It’s probably one of the worst things he’s ever heard in his life, actually.

But he’s not going anywhere. He’s done running. 

“You don’t have to like me,” Tony says softly, “that’s okay. I’ll still love you no matter what. I just… I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong. I wish you’d talk to me. I’m right here to listen, okay? I’ll listen and I’ll try to help.”

Morgan glares at him for a long minute and then huffs. “Peter is dead, isn’t he?”

Tony’s blood goes cold. “I, uh… we don’t—we don’t know that, yet.”

“Liar.”

“ _Morgan,_ I’m telling the truth. We really don’t know, okay? I swear.”

Morgan’s mouth screws up and then she presses her nose against the hardwood floor, closing her eyes. She starts to cry: quiet, heartbroken tears that she’s clearly been holding back for a long time. 

Tony understands. Hell, he gets it better than probably just about anyone. It’s a habit she inherited from him, after all. 

Slowly he reaches out and manages to tuck a fallen strand of hair behind her ear. Morgan sniffs in the same instant and Tony’s hand freezes, assuming the way she jerks is a flinch. 

But then she leans into the touch. 

Tony lets out a breath he didn’t even know he was holding.

“I know it’s tough,” he whispers. “It’s confusing and scary and it makes you angry and sad at the same time, huh?”

A little nod. Tony keeps going, “I get it. Really, I do. I… I love him so much, you know? I just want him to be safe, and I’ve spent so much time wondering if there’s something I’m missing or if I’m not doing enough. I _know_ I didn’t do enough before… But Morgan, I refuse to make that same mistake with you, okay? I need you to know that you have me. Even if you don’t want me around, even if you don’t like me, you have me.”

Morgan turns her head a little, cheeks damp and flushed, hair plastered to her skin. She sniffles again and then reaches out, so Tony gently pulls her from under the bed and lets her lay on his chest. 

“He didn’t even say goodbye,” she croaks.

Tony closes his eyes. “I know, honey. He didn’t say goodbye to me, either.”

* * *

They come every day. They work on him. They inject him with various substances and monitor his heart rate and ask him questions: _what is your date of birth? How old are you? What is your name? Where are you from?_

His answer to every single one is ‘I don’t know’. 

After a little while the questions stop. Ross seems satisfied that Peter’s been completely wiped, and Peter can only be grateful for the weird abilities his mom passed on that allow him to have nightly conversations with the dead.

He sees Ben a few more times when his head starts to get foggy again. They sit in the bleachers at baseball games, or walk in an empty park eating roasted chestnuts during the winter. Ben always cups the back of his neck and plants one right on Peter’s forehead—a big smacking kahuna of a kiss—and says, “You’ll be okay,” like it’s the last line in a prophecy and he’s sure, so sure, that Peter will.

It keeps him going.

Another time, however, he sees Richard.

They’re standing in the hallway of some expensively furnished apartment. They’re in a city, but it’s not New York; Peter can see the lights through the window, but they don’t match the skyline of his home. 

There’s blood all over the floor.

“This is where your mother stabbed herself in the stomach so she didn’t have to kill a kid,” Richard says by way of greeting.

He’s dressed in kevlar and looks a little younger than he had the last time they spoke. There’s red speckles on the toes of his combat boots, red flecked on his cheek, red everywhere. He sits on a dining table that must’ve been polished and set before whatever fight broke out here, and he swings his legs back and forth. His eyes are bright. 

“Hi,” Peter says, leaning against the far wall. He’s gotten pretty used to this weird shit by now. 

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard you.”

“Well then do you understand?”

Peter squints. “Define ‘understand’.”

“She’ll do anything,” Richard explains, voice edged with plea, “ _anything_ to keep from hurting you. And they’re gonna make her try to hurt you soon, Mark my words.”

At that, Peter pushes off the wall and leans around to look at the blood smeared on the ground. He feels sick. “How soon?”

“Days, I think. There’s a bit of a time-perception issue, though, so I could be off.”

“How do you know all of this, anyway?” Peter asks, feeling a little irritated now. “You talk like everything’s already set in stone, like the future is completely decided and no one has any say in anything and it’s all just _bullshit._ Like choices don’t exist, like it’s all just Fate or some other crap.” 

Richard smiles sadly. Then he pushes off the table and goes to stand opposite Peter, so they’re both wedged in the wide doorway. Their shoes touch. 

“Maybe it is.”

“I don’t believe that,” Peter says. 

Richard snorts. “You really are stubborn.”

“Yeah, well,” Peter looks at the blood again, “I would literally rather eat my own foot than live my life like I don’t have free will.”

Richard whistles low. “You should write a book on philosophy one day. Call it ‘Eating The Foot’.”

Peter struggles not to laugh. “Are you just saying that because you already know I write a philosophy book one day, but the only reason I do is because you plant the seed in my head?”

“Yes, that’s correct. My god-given purpose in the afterlife was to spurn you onto writing the worst book of all time. Believe it or not, all this other crap is insignificant in light of what’s coming. Be prepared for book signings and hand cramping and a lot of contemplating the universe.” 

Peter shakes his head. Stupid, this is so _stupid._

“What are we doing here?”

“I just wanted to prepare you,” Richard says quietly. “And maybe… I know what I said before, but maybe—maybe try to stop her? Before she does something drastic and gets herself killed?”

Peter stares. He studies the man in front of him, the one who talks like he’s already given up, the one with the sloped shoulders and dark eyes, and says, “Sure. I’ll try.”

And it’s like Peter’s given him the sun. 

“ _Thank you,”_ Richard says, voice cracking a little. “Thank you.”

* * *

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Michelle says for probably the thousandth time in an hour.

“It is,” Tony argues. “It’s much needed. It’ll just be the family. A nice dinner, no politics, no agendas. We’ll just, uh, eat pasta and be merry and get bloated. Sounds good, right?”

“It _sounds_ like a recipe for disaster,” Michelle retorts, folding her arms across her chest. It makes her swollen stomach more obvious beneath her baggy autumn sweater. 

_Jesus,_ Tony thinks. _Only two more months._

He doesn’t say that out loud, though, because he knows she’s been getting increasingly stressed about the baby as it is. Tony had taken the liberty of putting together the nursery the other day—nice and minimalistic, all gender neutral tones and baby proofed furniture—and she’d completely flipped out because _‘what’s the point of all of this when we don’t even know if it’ll live?’_

They’d stared at each other for a long time after that, her breathing hard, him kind of shell-shocked. Then she’d sat down heavily on the armchair he’d bought and started crying, and Tony hadn’t known what else to do besides hold her hand.

Now he shrugs. “Pepper is coming home after two weeks in Verona. _Two weeks._ She’s gonna be stressed and upset and I just—” Tony stops stirring the sauce for a second, “I just want her to feel _stable,_ okay? I want her to know that we’re all still here.”

Michelle’s face softens a little. She comes over to the counter and sits on one of the stools. “Anthony,” she says, “are you okay?”

Tony stops dead, blinks, and then jerkily returns to adding basil. “What do you mean?” he asks the tomato sauce.

“I mean, you’re doing all of this shit, taking on Peter’s portion of SI, watching Morgan—”

“Morgan went with Pepper to Italy,” Tony informs her flatly. “Pepper thought it might help. Me taking a break, that is. Like I could just put being a dad on pause or something, like I’m not constantly in agony over the fact that my own daughter hates my guts.”

Michelle reaches out and stays his hand so he’ll stop angrily sprinkling in spices. “I thought things were getting better?”

“They went from downright despise to general mistrust and reluctant communication. Pepper was concerned that…” Tony takes a deep breath so he doesn’t scream, “she was concerned that it was bad for Morgan to be alone with me right now given everything else going on. That maybe with Peter gone, she should just be around people she feels comfortable with.”

Michelle’s mouth parts a little. “That doesn’t seem like Pepper.”

“Well, she didn’t say it _exactly_ like that. She was—y’know, kind about it, tried to soften the blow with lots of hugs and compliments and a new screwdriver set. I just… this is gonna sound stupid, but I miss what I never even had. I miss my family.”

Michelle leans back a bit. “It doesn’t sound stupid,” she says. “The people you love most in this world went on without you. They created a life that didn’t include you because you were gone. It sucks and there’s no other way to say it, but _none_ of it is your fault.”

Tony smushes a tomato chunk. “Kinda feels like it, though.”

“Okay, so explain to me what you could’ve done differently to change things now.”

Tony tries to come up with something, but only succeeds in producing a pathetic squeaking noise. 

“See?” Michelle flails her arms a little. “It’s not your fault! You were snapped out of existence with absolutely no control of your own and tried your best to pick up the pieces when you came back. You’re trying to be a father, you’re trying to be a good husband, but you _can’t fix everything._ That’s one thing you and Peter both need to get through your ten-inch thick skulls: not every problem has a fucking solution, Anthony.”

He’s about to argue just for the sake of being petty and stubborn, but then the elevator chimes. It’s Rhodey, Steve, and May. The former and the latter are talking animatedly while Steve’s got his hands deep in the pockets of his slacks, shoulders hunched with discomfort. 

They all stop short. “Hey guys,” Rhodey says slowly. “What’s with the tension?”

“Tension?” Tony demands. “Don’t be ridiculous, there’s no tension.”

“We were just arguing,” Michelle says dryly. 

Tony clicks his tongue. “I would call it more of a feelings debate.” 

Michelle sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “You are _literally_ a goblin. I’m gonna see what’s holding up Keener.”

—  
  


“You’re late.”

“I’m not _late,_ I arrived precisely when I meant to.”

“So: late.”

Harley grunts at Michelle as he shucks his coat. It’s already bitterly cold and snowing in New York even though it’s only September—Tony gathers it’s something to do with the climate healing after the snap. It just doesn’t get hot like it used to.

“Keener,” Tony says as he sets the pot of steaming pasta on the table, careful not to burn his hands. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t show.”

“You said five, it’s five fifteen. What can I say? I got held up at home.”

Michelle raises an eyebrow. “Ariel?”

“Indy,” he corrects. “She peed on the living room carpet.”

“Mattie did the same thing the other day,” Steve comments after a sip of scotch. “I think it’s Buck and Peter being gone.”

“Well!” Tony claps his hands, “Whatever it was, we’re not gonna talk about it! This is a good times only dinner, capisce? No dark topics, no complaining—”

“So what the fuck are we supposed to talk about?” Harley demands. 

“We’ll figure that out after we smoke a bunch of weed,” May announces, and pulls a little sandwich bag of joints out of her cardigan pocket.

Tony pretends to be shocked. “You? Carrying drugs on your person? Why, it’s a scandal—”

“If you don’t shut up, you don’t get any.”

“Shutting up.”

—

Pepper gets home not five minutes later. She takes one sweeping, wide-eyed glance at them all sitting around the set table with a covered pot of hot pasta, and it’s like the weight of the world is being lifted from her shoulders. 

She _smiles._

God, Tony could eat the sun, he loves that smile so much. 

“I’m just gonna go put Morgan to bed,” she says, gesturing to the little girl in her arms, who’s already utterly dead to the world as it is. “Long flight and all.”

The rest of them nod and greet her and then go back to talking about whatever the hell it was they were discussing before—Tony hadn’t been listening; he was watching the elevator like a sad puppy. 

Now he follows after Pepper in an equally dog-like fashion, jogging a little to catch up with her impossible speed. Like seriously, the fact that she can walk that fast in three-inch heels is its own superpower. 

“Hey,” he says, leaning in the doorway just as she’s laying Morgan out on her bed. “How was your trip?”

Pepper glances up. “Oh, y’know, boring. I was stuck in meetings every single day, all day long. Not much time for sight-seeing.”

“So it goes,” Tony says. “How’s the munchkin?”

Pepper’s lip quirks at the corner. She smooths Morgan’s hair back. “She’s good. The sun helped. Being away from all the memories, too, I think.”

“And you? Did it help you, too?”

Pepper rips her eyes away from their daughter and tries to smile, probably tries to say yes, but all that comes out is a shuddering, stilted gasp. “No,” she says quietly. “No, it just… follows me. The worrying, and the missing him, and—”

Tony’s already by her side at this point. Wordlessly, he wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her close. Pepper practically falls into the hug, and Tony shuts his eyes so he can’t cry. He doesn’t deserve to be the one crying, right now. 

Her head is heavy on his shoulder but Tony doesn’t care. He’ll carry the weight of it, of her, until he’s dead from exhaustion if he has to.

But Pepper pulls back eventually and wipes her eyes with that _silly me_ smile. It breaks something inside Tony. He shakes his head and leans forward, softly kissing the tip of her freckled nose. “I wish I could make it better,” he whispers. “I really, really do.”

And Pepper just laughs a little, holds his face in her hands, and says, “You _do._ God, you have _no idea._ You make everything better, Tony.”

“Yeah?” he asks, still a little uncertain. “That’s good to hear, real swell.”

Pepper laughs. It’s bright like a bell chime and makes his stupid broken ticker skip a beat. Geez, he’s over the moon for her. 

Tony plants another one on her cheek. “Do you wanna get high and eat too much linguine?”

“ _God,_ yes.”

—

Naturally, Michelle was right. 

It’s a recipe for disaster.

Everything seems like it’s going well, and then it’s not, because halfway through dinner Rhodey says: “I think we should consider having some kind of service.”

“Service?” Tony asks, still smiling at a joke Harley had made. “What do you mean?” 

“For Peter.”

A switch is flipped. Everyone freezes. Tony’s got the salt shaker two inches above his plate and his hand hovers, his blood cold in his veins. 

“I’m sorry?” he asks, voice low and kind of deadly. 

Rhodey’s entire demeanour softens. “It’s just that it’s been _months,_ Tony. Five months, to be exact. Even _you_ weren’t gone that long when you’d been taken and Peter is—don’t take this the wrong way, but he’s got the brains to bust himself out of that kind of a situation in half the time. I just don’t think it’s healthy for us all to sit around waiting like he’s—” 

“I advise shutting the hell up before I flip this fucking table,” Michelle snaps. Her hands are balled up. Tony knows it’s so that no one can see them shaking. 

Rhodey sighs. He leans back in his chair. “So what do you propose? How long do we go on like this for?”

“Until he comes back,” Pepper says. 

“And what if he doesn’t?” 

“He _will,”_ Michelle grinds out. 

To Tony’s left, Harley slowly lowers his utensils. “I think he might be right, Jones—”

“Oh don’t you _dare_ start with me—”

“You _know_ he’d hate this,” Harley says. “He’d want you to move on.”

“Move on? Move _on?!”_ Michelle’s eyes are wide. “What are you even _saying_ right now? I’m seven months pregnant with his kid and you think I should _move on?”_

“I just—”

“He wasn’t alone,” Steve pipes up suddenly. “Buck was with him and he’s not back yet, either, but you don’t see me having a funeral. Sometimes these things take a while, okay? But they’re not dead. I’d… I’d know if Buck was dead.”

“See?!” Michelle gestures at Steve. “Thank you, Rogers.” 

Steve shrugs. Then he says, “If they’re not back by the holidays, I’ll start to worry. Buck would hate to miss Hanukkah.”

Harley shakes his head. “What if they’re not back by then, though? What do we do? What if it’s _years?”_

“Then I’ll wait,” Michelle says stubbornly, voice breaking. “I’ll wait until I’m eighty because that’s what he deserves.”

Then she pushes back from the table, her chair scraping loudly against the floor. She literally throws her napkin down before storming out, calling over her shoulder, “May, are you coming?”

May jerks with surprise and then scrambles to her feet. “I should make sure she’s okay. You guys can keep the weed.”

Then they’re both gone, leaving the others in thick silence. 

“Well,” Tony says softly, “I guess that’s dinner.”

* * *

A particularly rough round of electroshock therapy has Peter lying on his side, cheek pressed against the cool tile floor. 

He sees without seeing. He can’t feel much of anything these days except pain breaking through the numbness. He probably has some kind of nerve damage or something. 

But still he’s been staring at a specific tile on the wall for hours now, blinking only when he has to, head aching. 

He’s just about to give up, but decides to try one last thing.

Instead of trying to tap into whatever unnamed, undiscovered abilities he might have inherited from his mother, instead of trying to define something completely nebulous, he focuses on what he _knows._

His anger: white hot in the pit of his stomach, always there these days, always making his blood hot and his hands shake. He imagines it as something magmatic, something tangible, something burning him from the inside out; a physical thing that can cause physical damage.

The tile on the wall cracks, and so do three below it. Peter feels something warm and wet trickling down his nose and he knows it’s blood even before the iron taste touches his lips. 

“Oh yeah,” he says. “It’s all coming together.” 

  
  


* * *

He’s been waiting for it, but he still doesn’t see it coming when it happens.

They all come in together: Ross and his mother and a bunch of white-scrubbed attendants. His mother—and he knows it’s not really her, knows it by the blank look on her face and her vacant eyes—is armed and pale and stands by Ross like a henchman. 

But she’s alive. 

Then they drag another person inside and rip the bag off of their head and that’s right around when rational thought leaves Peter’s brain. 

His vision tunnels a little. His hands flex and relax. He does his absolute best to remain completely impassive. 

Nat’s whole body is shaking and covered in bruises and cuts. Her hair is ragged like it hasn’t been washed in weeks and Peter knows he probably doesn’t look all that better.

She’s a skeleton of herself; there are dark bags beneath her wide eyes and her cheekbones jut out too sharply. She’s starved, but she’s still in there. She’s still Natasha _,_ still Natalia, still _Nat._

“Petya—” she starts to say, but one of her handlers tases her right in the neck. She seizes and shuts up like a dog with a shock collar. 

“Soldier,” Ross says, moving forward. “I know these last few months have been very difficult for you, but I believe that your programming is almost complete. Soon it’ll be time for a… promotion, of sorts, for good behaviour and compliance. A bed. Warm food. Maybe a shower, who knows. All you have to do is prove to me that you’re ready.”

He pauses. 

“Do you recognise that woman?”

Nat. It’s Nat. She’s his best friend, she’s a pain in his ass, she’s his _sister._ He pretends to detest her but secretly adores her and would probably die for her, but she’d do anything to stop him from doing something as stupid as that. 

“No,” he says flatly, and Nat’s shoulders fall. Her last bit of strength gives out and the only reason she doesn’t collapse to her knees are the grips of the men holding her up. 

“Well, that’s probably for the best. She’s a bad woman. She’s done countless terrible things. Killed innocents, worked for the KGB...” 

Ross comes a little closer. Then he reaches toward his rib cage, hand slipping beneath the left side of his suit jacket to pull a gun from its holster. 

He holds it out for Peter. 

“I want you to kill her.”

This is it: the ultimate test of true loyalty. Ross will never believe he’s actually been wiped if he doesn’t kill Natasha right here, right now. 

He might as well ask Peter to swallow Mars whole or shoot himself in the head or eat a cool ranch Dorito chip, because that is _not_ fucking happening. 

But he takes the gun. Readjusts his grip on it. Feels the cool metal against his palm, feels his stomach drop into his ass. 

He lifts it. Points it right at Natasha’s head. 

Her eyes meet his and Peter drops the charade right then. For a split second his face is wide open and she can see all the way to the ends of him, down to his soul, probably. And she knows. 

_It’s gonna be okay._

_Duck._

He cocks the gun. 

She ducks.

Peter fires. 

All hell breaks loose.

—

It happens like this:

Peter shoots Cooper in the chest. Cooper goes down, smearing the walls with red, a big blood stain blooming right over his heart. The handlers’ grip on Nat ceases to exist as they both stupidly reach for their weapons, so she dropkicks one, takes his gun, and shoots the other.

By this point Peter’s already got his gun on the second-most dangerous person in the room: his own mother.

She’s pointing her own right back at him. 

“Hiya,” he says. “How’s things?”

She doesn’t reply. She doesn’t even _recognise_ him. God, he’d really underestimated their hold on her, hadn’t he? When she’d said ‘brainwashed’ it had been hard to picture something like _this._

There’s still Ross to worry about, but the idiot had handed over his best weapon and the instant he goes to reach for the knife strapped to his ankle, a miracle happens:

Mutiny.

Well, not mutiny in the exact sense of the word. It’s actually just Clint Barton ripping off a surgical mask and revealing his ugly face to the world. 

“Oh wow, would you look at that,” Peter says, laughing hysterically, “it’s our knight in shining armour.”

“I knew it,” Clint snaps. “I _knew_ that you’d say some ungrateful sarcastic shit instead of actually _thanking_ me for saving your asses.”

“Well at least he brought a gun instead of a bow,” Peter asides to Nat, jerking his chin at the one Clint’s pointing right at Ross.

And Nat’s crying. Like, actually crying: tears on her cheeks, eyes gleaming, the whole she-bang. 

_Not in love with Barton my left ass cheek,_ Peter thinks, but manages not to say it out loud. 

“What the _hell,”_ Ross hisses. 

“Not the evening you had planned?” asks Peter.

Ross’ face twists in pure fury. With the moustache, it actually looks a little intimidating instead of just plain ridiculous, but Peter’s faced down way worse. Thanos, for example. It’s hard to be scared of anything after going head-to-head with a big angry grape. 

But then Ross snaps, “Viper, _now.”_

And that’s bad. It’s really bad, actually, because instead of shooting Peter she shoots Clint. Then Nat, right in the shoulder, and lastly it’s pointed right at him. 

Mary hesitates. 

And then she fires.

—

The seconds between the bullet going in and Peter ending up on the ground cease to exist. Peter blinks and he’s down. 

There’s heat, and when his hand flies to his gut he feels something wet and warm and sticky. Blood, he’s _bleeding._

“I could be wrong,” Peter deadpans, “but I’m pretty sure this stuff is supposed to be inside me.”

Ross ignores that. “ _Finish it,”_ he snaps at Mary.

“Y’know, I’m starting to get the feeling you don’t like me very much,” Peter rasps up at him. 

Ross kicks him right where the wound in his side is. Peter grunts in pure agony. Fuck, _fuck,_ not even the incisions hurt this much. Snapping… snapping was worse, objectively, but the severe damage to his nerves made it a little less horrific. 

He presses down on the bullet hole as hard as he can, but the edges of his vision are blurring and his grip is growing weaker by the second. That’s decidedly not good and he doesn’t need a medical license to know it. 

_I am not gonna die,_ he thinks. _Nope. No. I refuse._

More handlers are coming in, all armed to the T, and Peter knows he’s fucked, he knows it’s over. 

But also…

He looks at his mother, who is already looking down at him, holding her gun in a white-knuckled grip. The expression on her face is absolute torment. 

“ _Do it!”_ Ross yells. 

Heartbeats, it’s all heartbeats: seconds stretched out ad infinitum. Time stretches and snaps back. It’s just blood pumping, just the heat and sweat of being alive. 

“You know me,” Peter says softly, reaching out with a red hand to grip his mother’s ankle. “Look at me. You don’t have to do this, mom. You’re not a monster. You’re good, do you hear me? Whatever they told you, whatever they made you think—”

“Shut the hell up!” Ross barks, and aims another blow to Peter’s rib cage. It shuts him up alright, and it also gets him coughing. That makes the gunshot wound hurt ten times as much. 

“ _Do it,_ Viper.”

His mother sucks in a sharp breath. 

“Better me than him,” she says, and presses the tip of her nine mil against the underside of her jaw. 

And fuck that, absolutely _fuck that,_ Peter doesn’t care what the hell the spirits tell him in the night, he is _not_ gonna lose her. 

So he closes his eyes. 

Peter grabs the fear like a rope and pulls, yanking back the figurative curtain to reveal the ugly mess of his hatred, hot and ripe and glowing like coals on a fire pit. 

His nails dig into his palms. His vision whites out and his ears start to ring but he keeps his focus, he concentrates harder than he ever has in his entire life, and then—

Six dull thuds: the sounds of dead bodies hitting the floor. 

Peter passes out.

—

When he wakes up, he’s in Bucky’s arms.

“Put me down,” is what Peter grunts immediately, trying to push out of the other man’s grip. “I can walk.”

“No you can’t,” Bucky snaps down at him—and God, he looks like hell, but he’s still in there. They couldn’t break Nat and they couldn’t break him. 

He’s running them through the halls of whatever facility Ross had brought them to. Peter’s heartbeat is slow and thready, but Bucky’s put rags on the gunshot wound to staunch the blood flow. 

“What happened?” Peter asks dazedly. 

“You killed them,” Bucky says, and it makes Peter’s gut clench. “Ross, the handlers—all of ‘em. Well, everyone in the room, but they rest of them are already looking for us. We gotta bust outta here quick.”

Peter nods. They push through a set of hospital doors and they’re halfway down a corridor when the alarm starts to blare. “Fuck,” Bucky hisses. “It’s just down here.”

‘It’ is a large open chamber housing six dark tanks that Peter can’t see inside. Mary and Nat are already here, and they’ve got Clint’s body resting against some kind of control panel. 

“I’m alright,” Clint is saying, but he’s not. He looks like he’s had the life completely drained out of him. Still he grasps at Nat’s forearm. 

She’s crying again, but they’re not good tears this time. 

“I’m so sorry,” Mary’s saying. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Hey, it’s not your fault,” Clint rasps. “My decision to come here, after all. Thought I could—” he coughs and spits blood. “Oh, would you look at that? Can’t be good, can it?”

“Fuck,” Nat sobs. “What the fuck were you _thinking?”_

He meets her eyes and shakes his head hopelessly. “I just… I owed you.” 

“ _Stupid,”_ Nat hisses. “You’re so goddamn stupid. You should have called Stark or Steve or—”

“I know, I know,” Clint nods, “but I… I wanted to be the one to save you, Natasha. For once I just… I wanted it to be me.”

Nat wipes the tears from her cheeks and leaves blood streaks there. “Don’t you get it by now, Barton?” she whispers. “You already did. You always do.”

Clint stares at her for a long second, lips parting a little. Then he shifts his grip to squeeze her hand. “You’ll be okay.”

“No, I won’t,” Nat says urgently, clawing at nothing, at blood and sinew, “No, you don’t get to leave me, not after all the shit we’ve been through—”

“It’s alright,” Clint whispers. “It’s okay. Tell Laura… tell her I’m sorry, would you? Tell her I…”

Then he stills and slackens, the light leaving his eyes in the same instant. Peter just stands there like an asshole, leaning on Bucky and clutching at the wound in his side while Nat cries over Clint’s unmoving body.

Shouting echoes from not too far away. 

“Shit,” Bucky whispers. “Goddamnit, we gotta go.”

So Peter moves. He ignores the pain that flares in his side because it’s simply not important right now. What’s important is getting out of here, getting somewhere safe. That’s all that matters. 

“Natasha,” he says, stumbling toward her and grabbing at her arm. “Nat, hey, we need to leave.”

Nat writhes out of his grip and clutches Clint. “We can’t,” she sobs. “We have to bring him! There has to be something we can do!”

“Nat,” Peter says again, dropping to his knees to hold her face in his hands—tear-streaks breaking the red smudges, eyes bloodshot. “I’m sorry, but that’s only gonna slow us down. We have to go _now.”_

“I don’t think so,” says a voice. 

It’s unfamiliar to Peter but still makes the hairs on the back of his neck rise like he knows it. The four of them whip around to find the speaker: a short, blonde woman who looks incredibly pissed off. She’s holding a duffel bag that he recognises as his own, and even worse he has a vague recollection of her standing over him after the explosion and rifling through his pockets. 

She’d done it. She’s the one that blew up the building, she’s the one who brought them here. 

“Yelena,” Mary breathes. “It’s me. It’s Maria.”

“I know who you are,” Yelena Belova says. “I’m not brainwashed, Maria, I’m here of my own volition.”

“Well,” Peter says, “guess that wraps everything up in a nice pretty ribbon, huh?”

Yelena jerks her chin at him. “He’s stupid. I like him.”

“Thanks,” Mary says, dazed, “I made him myself.”

Bucky has the audacity to snarf into his fist. He shakes his head. “So what, are you here to kill us?”

“No,” Yelena says, to Peter’s gigantic surprise. “I just told you, I’m here of my own free will. To _save_ you.”

“You _blew us up,”_ he snaps. “You were working for Ross the entire time, weren’t you?!”

“That was before. This is now. Things change.”

“Real cute, but I still don’t trust her as far as I can throw her and we ain’t got time.” Bucky then pistolwhips Yelena right in the back of the head. She drops like a marionette with her strings cut. He swiftly picks her up and throws her over his shoulder. “You guys good to walk?”

“Oh sure,” Peter says, feeling more and more terrible with every passing second. “Nat, what about you?”

“It’s just my shoulder,” she says gruffly. “The bullet went through and through.”

He nods and tries to stand, but fails epically and stumbles back into the panel. His elbow hits something—a button, maybe, or a switch—and of course Fate has to serve them one last ass-fuck, because the panel hiding what’s inside the tanks retracts, and inside…

Inside one is Nat, but younger. Inside another is Yelena and some other girl with dark hair, and there are more copies of them along the back wall, and even more stored above on the second floor. 

Peter’s only instinct is to grab Nat—the real Nat, the one at his feet—and hold onto her.

“What the fuck,” Nat breathes. “What the _fuck.”_

“Clones,” Peter says, because that has to be what this is. There’s no other explanation for the sixteen year old Natasha Romanoff stuck in cryogenesis, eyes shut like she’s sleeping. “Jesus _Christ.”_

“What the hell are they doing here?” Mary demands. “What the hell—”

“Whatever they were doing, I don’t care,” Bucky says upon snapping out of his shock. “We have to go _now.”_

Nat looks sick. “We can’t just—”

Bucky cocks his gun and starts shooting at the wires feeding into the tanks. The lights flicker out. Gas starts to leak into the air. 

“Now they don’t matter,” he says. “Let’s get gone, alright?”

They have no choice but to head for the door; Bucky’s bullets had given away their location and the shouting is growing nearer, but right before they leave the chamber, Peter says, “Wait.”

It’s just a hunch. He rummages through the pockets on Yelena Belova’s cargo pants and almost gives up until: 

His lighter.

_MJ’s_ lighter. 

Peter runs his thumb over her initials one final time. He’s done it so much they’ve almost faded. 

Then he sparks it, throws it, and just manages to usher them all out before the flame touches the tank’s gas and the whole chamber combusts.

* * *

They find an SUV in a garage and peel out before the whole place goes up. Peter is soaked with sweat and hot and aching everywhere. He has no idea how he’s still on his feet by the end of it, but the second he slams the car door shut, all of the energy drains away. 

Nat clings to him in the back seat, fists curled around his shirt, sobbing into his neck. 

Peter wonders: are they dead, or just dreaming? 

—

They drive for a long time before they figure out where they’ve been. It’s a facility tucked away in the woods, maybe seventy kilometers outside of Kiev. Remote, isolated, and now spewing a pillar of black smoke. 

No one comes after them. Peter knows blowing up that one room had saved them. It’d provided a much-needed barrier between them and Ross’ soldiers and it’s probably the only reason they made it out alive. 

But he can’t get the image out of his head: Natasha, arms crossed over her chest, eyes shut tight. Frozen in time, ghostly pale. They’d _cloned_ her, and when? Are there more or had he destroyed all of them? 

He looks at his mother. She’s glaring out the passenger side window and there are tear streaks on her cheeks that he can just barely see. There hadn’t been any clones of her. Why not? 

Nat is slumped over Yelena, both of them out of it. It’s Bucky who breaks the thick silence that’s enveloped them all since they busted out. “You good?”

He’s looking at Peter through the rearview mirror. Peter shrugs. Nat had fished the slug out a little while ago and given him the shittiest patch job known to man, but at least he’s not bleeding out anymore. 

“No,” Peter croaks. “You?”

“No.” 

Peter nods. “We should find somewhere safe to wash off and then get back to the Quin.”

“Ready to go home?”

“Almost,” Peter says. “But we need to make a pit-stop first. I have some questions for King T’Challa.”

* * *

Tony and Michelle meet May at the hospital for lunch. 

He brings the food. Michelle brings coffees for him and May and a green tea latte for herself. He absolutely despises even stepping foot in the cesspool of bacteria that is Queens Memorial, but May’s been working so many doubles that it makes it hard to see her at all if they don’t meet on her turf. 

“A salad?” he demands when she pulls the plastic container out of the fridge. “That’s what you call sustenance? Nonsense, have some of my curry.”

“I can’t,” May says, dropping into the chair opposite him. “If I eat anything remotely spicy I’ll get indigestion and then my entire shift will be ruined.”

“So you’re gonna be running on rabbit food for the next seven hours instead?”

May gives him a dry look. “I’ll make it through. How are you, anyway? How’s Pepper?”

“Pepper is, uh… y’know,” Tony shrugs. “She keeps leaving on business trips. I think being at home is hard.”

“So she’s out of town again?” 

A nod. “Yeah, but it’s more Avengers-y business. She’s got a meeting with King T’Challa.”

“Sounds fancy,” Michelle pipes up dryly. “Hey, are you gonna eat that orange?”

Tony says no, so she takes it and starts peeling it, and he and May have already moved onto the next topic of whether or not the Mets will beat the Red Sox this Friday.

Then Michelle hisses in pain.

Tony whips around because at this point, it’s pretty much hard-wired into him to always be on guard when it comes to Michelle Jones. “You good?”

“Yeah, it’s just braxton hicks. I’ve been having them for weeks now.” 

May absentmindedly reaches out and squeezes Michelle’s arm. “Just walk ’em off, hon.”

Michelle nods. She gets up and starts pacing around the break room, rubbing her abdomen while Tony and May bicker. 

“Enough about baseball!” May bursts eventually. “I think you need to make it more apparent to Pepper that you’re here for her.”

“And how am I supposed to do that? What have I _not_ done already?”

“Maybe… maybe spend some time alone, just the two of you. MJ and I could look after the little monster for you guys. Go to Guam or Hawaii or something.”

“Hawaii,” Tony deadpans. “Like this is the time for drinking a cocktail out of a coconut. _Come on,_ May.”

“I’m just saying—” 

She stops short and Tony does, too. They both slowly turn in Michelle’s direction at the sound of something splattering. 

Tony stares at the wet tiles beneath Michelle’s combat boots. 

“Oh,” he says stupidly. “Oh, _fuck.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :D


	6. he will still love her

They ditch the car twice and drive for a while without stopping. At around midnight, Bucky pulls into the lot of a little motel. “I’ll take care of her,” he says, jerking his chin toward Yelena. “You get us some rooms. Be casual about it, okay?”

“Yeah, I’m not a dumbass.” Peter tries the door and finds that the child lock is still on. He gives Bucky a deadpan look, and Bucky’s retort is a raised eyebrow. “Dude.”

“Just keep your head down,” Bucky says, and unlocks the door for him. 

Under the cover of darkness, Peter bypasses the main office and instead takes the stairs up to the second level. He presses his ear to a few doors, listening for snoring or breathing or any signs of life, and finally finds one that’s completely silent. 

Breaking the lock isn’t hard. He slips inside and shuts the door behind him, scanning the room itself. There’s a big enough bed in the centre and an old TV, a couple of chairs, and an en suite bathroom. It’ll do just fine. 

Peter nods to himself, takes a deep breath, and then another. Each one is more ragged than the last. His head falls back against the door and his eyes shut tight. His whole body is shaking like a leaf. 

He’s about to spiral into a full-blown panic attack when someone knocks on the door. 

Peter jumps a good foot into the air. He peers through the peephole and finds that it’s just Bucky, however, with Yelena slung over his shoulder. Maria and Nat are behind him. 

Peter opens the door. “Took you long enough.”

“What? _What?”_ Bucky demands. “She started waking up, I had to hit her again.”

Peter rolls his eyes. “Just put her on the bed,” he says. Then to Nat, softer this time, “Do you wanna shower?”

Nat shakes her head, ripping her eyes away from Yelena and Buck. “I’m gonna find food,” she whispers, voice cracking from disuse. 

Peter nods. He looks her up and down; notes her stiffened posture and sunken cheeks and tangled hair, the way she’s still holding Clint’s gun in her hand like the bad part of the story isn’t over yet. 

Peter cups the back of her neck and kisses her forehead. Nat makes a tiny whimpering sound in the back of her throat, and it scares him. Her _fear_ scares him. It’s too raw, too real. 

“Have fun foraging for berries,” he says to her, and her distress turns into exasperation. She goes one way and he goes another. 

Peter shuts the bathroom door. Locks it. Stands there for a moment with his hand braved against the wall, head spinning, and then starts moving before he can start thinking. 

He strips his shirt off and examines his unkempt state in the rusted mirror. He can count all of his ribs. The gunshot wound is crookedly stitched and reddened, the skin still stained with blood. His hair is tangled and matted and his eyes—

He looks away. Turns the shower onto hot and lets the steam envelope him. When he steps under the stream, the water runs red. He imagines this is how a snake feels when it sheds its old skin: that film that’s been clinging to his body for months now is washed away. He uses the complimentary soap bar to scrub his skin until it’s flushed. He washes his hair twice and then again when he feels like it’s not enough, careful to keep the suds from touching the stitches. It’ll need to be disinfected properly at some point, but they don’t have any supplies.

If they can get to Wakanda, they’ll be safe. And from there… 

And from there, what? He killed the secretary of defense. God. Peter closes his eyes and rests his forehead against the shower wall, trying to force the thoughts away. 

They’re not important right now. What’s important is getting to safety. That’s all that matters. What they did to get there—what _he_ did—won’t matter. 

Peter realises his nails are digging into his palms only when they start to sting. He scrubs a hand down his face and then turns the water off, yanking down the towel he’d thrown over the shower curtain. 

He dries off, wraps up, and gets out. 

Natasha is sitting on the closed toilet lid. She’s holding some kind of grooming kit. 

“Found this under the sink,” she says, eyes rimmed with red. “You need a haircut.”

“Nat, I don’t really think this is the time—”

“Peter,” she says, rough and sharp, “just let me do this? Please?”

He nods slowly and changes spots with her. She hovers behind him, hands shaking as she grips the scissors and starts snipping away at his curls. Despite that, there’s an obvious familiarity in her movements, an ingrained dexterity in the way she pulls a strand, cuts it, and combs it through. She does it over and over until she eventually relaxes a little, ceasing to the muscle-memory. 

“Don’t tell me you went undercover in a beauty salon or something.”

“Once,” she says, and he knows she’s smirking a little. “Just for a few months.”

Peter wants to shake his head. “Well, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Nat is quiet for a long minute. Then, “I don’t. I never have. I only pretend.”

“Natasha—”

“I thought—” her breath hitches, “they told me you were dead. At first I didn’t believe them, but then I—I started hoping it was true, because otherwise you’d be going through what I was going through and I didn’t want—”

“Okay,” Peter stands and gently prizes the scissors away, setting them down on the counter and then going over to her. “Nat, listen: I’m fine. I’m—I mean, I don’t know what I am, but I’m alive. We’re—”

He wants to say _we’re all alive,_ but he can’t. 

Clint isn’t. 

“God,” Peter breathes. “Jesus, I’m so fucking sorry.”

Nat bites down on her lip before she can start crying, but her eyes are already full of tears. She shakes her head and wipes them away so they don’t fall. “I’m gonna shower. Get out, Petya.”

“Yeah,” Peter nods. “Just uh, don’t slip or something. That would be so anticlimactic.”

Nat flips him the bird as he leaves. Peter rejoins the others and finds Yelena out of it on the bed and his mother sitting beside her on one of the chairs. Barnes is sorting through supplies at the little table by the curtained window. 

“Four guns,” he says to Peter, “not much ammo. A few Ironman protein bars—”

“I’m sorry?”

“No correlation to your pops, Nat just thought it was funny. Look, they have 12% protein and caramel flavour.”

Peter rolls his eyes. “I’ll be right as rain in no time.”

Bucky grins. He grabs the duffel off the chair and hands it to Peter. “You’ve got clothes in there. Go ahead and change in the closet or something.”

Peter takes the bag with gratitude and rifles through it, producing something suitable to wear. He changes quickly, but it’s painstaking with the barely-patched hole in his side. He feels better in clean clothes, though. Fresh socks are God’s gift to humanity. 

“I don’t wanna stay here overnight,” he says to Buck. “How far is the Quin?”

“Few clicks east,” Bucky replies around his protein bar. “We can head out once everyone’s cleaned up. You fine to fly it?”

“Yeah,” Peter says, lacing up his boots. 

“Good, ’cuz I don’t think Nat’s in the right frame of mind. Think we should just let her sleep on the way there.”

Peter nods. His gaze shifts over Bucky’s shoulder to the sleeping form of Yelena Belova. He walks toward her, standing over her. She doesn’t look dangerous like this. 

“Are you sure we can trust her?” he asks Mary. 

“I…” Mary hesitates, and then shakes her head. She looks completely shattered, sitting there with her knees pulled up to her chest, pale and stiff. “I’m not really sure of anything, anymore, but… she was good. When I knew her, she was good.”

Peter nods. “Let’s hope she still is.”

* * *

Nat doesn’t sleep on the Quin. 

She paces the length of it instead, gnawing at her thumbnail and glancing around furtively like even this high up they’re still not safe.

Peter calls her up to the cockpit. 

“Problem?”

“Hmm? Oh, no. We’re still on the right bearing, good altitude. I just wanted to maybe talk about what’s got you five jump scares from a straightjacket, maybe?”

Nat gives him a dry look as she drops into the co-pilot’s seat. “What the hell do you think?”

“No, yeah,” Peter flicks on the autopilot, “I know. But I’m asking if you wanna get it off your chest.” He pauses, waiting. “So do you?”

Nat hesitates, squinting out at the endless grey sky. They have to cut through a storm to get where they need to go, and Peter is having a hard time reconciling this miserable autumn weather with the spring heat of what seems like only a month or so ago. Just how many times had they put him to sleep? How long was he out for? How much was he awake for that he can’t even remember?

“They gave me drugs,” Nat says eventually, quiet-like, almost as if she’s ashamed. “I saw… bad things. Hallucinations.”

Peter studies her: clenched jaw, brows drawn together, hands flat over her thighs like she needs to keep them still. His stomach turns. 

“They waterboarded me,” he says, and her head shoots up. “Did they do that to you?”

Wordlessly she shakes her head. 

Peter nods, scanning the horizon again. “They must have been using different methods. Physical torture on me, psychological on you. Probably some kind of combination on Buck since he’s the strongest.”

Nat hunches over and runs her hands through her still-damp hair. “Did they… um, did they ever get to you?”

In all the years he’s known her, he doesn’t think he’s ever heard Natasha Romanoff say the word ‘um’. It’s a weird thing to be shook about, but he’s shook. Blinking, he says, “Almost. You?”

“No,” Nat replies firmly. “I have a failsafe.” 

“A failsafe?”

“Method of loci,” she says. “Clint taught it to me. I basically disassociated the entire time, went kind of catatonic.”

Peter nods. “Speaking of Clint,” he starts slowly, gauging her reaction, “how the hell did he know where we were?”

Nat stares at him for a few seconds and then slowly rolls up her shirt sleeve. She points out the faintest little scar on her forearm. “We both had these trackers implanted in us. Something we did together back in the day. When my vitals drop to a certain point or I get malnourished enough, he—uh, he would get my coordinates. It was basically a waiting game.”

Peter feels something inside of himself wither. He runs a hand down his face. “I… fuck.”

“Wasn’t your fault.”

“Yeah, but still,” he swallows. “I wish I could’ve done more.”

“You…” Nat breaks off, eyes wide. “Petya, you pretty much did all the heavy lifting there. God, I thought it was Maria who saved our asses, but she was just as shocked as I was. I didn’t—did you _know_ you could do that?”

“No,” he says. Then, “not really. I… I’ve been getting better at it over time. It started last year when I… anyway, I just—I was just angry. That’s all I remember.”

Nat gnaws her lip. He can’t remember if he’s ever seen her this vulnerable. “What exactly did you do?”

“I think I kind of… exploded their brain meats?”

They’re both silent for a beat, and then they burst into laughter. Buck and Maria both whip around at the sound, and it only makes them bust up harder. Peter clutches his side and wipes a tear from his cheek. “Jesus,” he says, and then, “we’re here. Brace for imaginary impact.”

* * *

They don’t get blown out of the sky or anything, but the minute they pass through the barrier, he loses control of the Quin. It’s landed for him in an open hangar where King T’Challa, Okoye, and Shuri are waiting. 

Peter and Nat come down together first, and the surprise on their faces isn’t well-hidden. 

“Your Highnesses,” Peter greets, and then with more familiarity, “Okoye.” 

“Nat, Peter,” she returns, grinning a little, “I heard you’ve been MIA.”

“Better than KIA,” he says. “How’s things?”

Okoye shrugs. “Wakanda is thriving under King T’Challa’s reign, but might I ask where in Bast’s ass you’ve both been for the last six months?”

“Oh, y’know, around,” Peter says, as the others descend the ramp. 

Shuri’s eyes widen. “James?”

“It’s _Buck,_ kit, we’ve been over this,” Bucky says. He’s got Yelena over his shoulder again. Peter is starting to get a little concerned about that at this point. “Anywhere I can lay her down?”

“The medical bay,” Shuri says quickly. “Come, come.”

* * *

“So you were looking for a serum,” Shuri pieces together slowly, “and got yourselves kidnapped in the process, busted yourselves out, and now you’re here… why exactly?”

Peter shifts on his stool. They’re all sitting around Shuri’s lab, which reminds Peter way too much of the ones at SI. 

“They kept me in vibranium restraints,” Peter says, and T’Challa straightens. “They had a three-inch thick vibranium door. There’s _no way_ Ross managed to get his hands on that much of it without your knowledge.” 

“Forgive me, Peter,” Okoye cuts in, “but are you accusing us of conspiring with Thaddeus Ross?”

“No, I’m not, but—”

“I gave it to him,” T’Challa says, shaken. “To Ross, ages ago. It was one of his conditions when he came to me with the Accords. He told me it was the only way to build a bridge of trust between our two nations: to truly share all of the resources available between us. I had no idea he would use it for _this.”_

Peter drums his fingers on the counter. “So you just gave it to him? Just like that?”

“Well, I negotiated the original amount down to half the size. And it’s not as if these sorts of deals have never been struck before; I’ve supplied your father with vibranium, and my father supplied your grandfather. We don’t hoard here.”

Peter shrugs. “Well, I just wanted to ask.”

Nat’s head whips around. “That’s it? That’s all we came here for?”

“Oh God, no,” Peter slips off the stool. “I needed access to certain pieces of equipment. Shuri, is it okay with you if I dink around in here for a little bit?”

She looks up from her tablet. “As long as you don’t break anything.”

“Scout’s honour,” he says, pulling up to a computer. 

“What are you up to?” Nat asks suspiciously.

“We didn’t get the serum, but we got her,” he says, jerking his chin toward Yelena’s prone body. “And she’s clearly been re-enhanced.”

“She’s been unconscious for forty minutes straight,” Nat points out. 

Peter clicks his tongue. “No she hasn’t.”

“No, I haven’t,” Yelena agrees dryly, eyes still closed. 

Bucky rounds on her. “Hey, what the fuck? I’ve been carrying you around this whole time for no reason?!”

Yelena hums. “Didn’t feel like walking.”

Bucky puts his hands on his hips. “The nerve of you. The absolute _nerve._ You’ve got the audacity to blow us up and then force me to cart you around like a rag doll?! I’m over ninety years old, you know! I have a bad back!”

Yelena cracks an eye. “You’re a genetically enhanced super soldier. You don’t even know what a bad back is.”

“Speaking of genetic enhancements,” Peter gloves up, snatches a clean test tube, and rolls his wheeled stool up to the examination table she’s lying on, “can I have some of your spit?”

Yelena stares. Then she looks at Natasha. “He’s strange in a twitchy kind of way. I can see why you adopted him.”

“I didn’t _adopt_ him—”

“I have _not_ been adopted. Not by her, anyway,” Peter says. “And I’ll have you know that I successfully gave her the silent treatment for several weeks.” 

Okoye raises an eyebrow at that. “And here I thought the two of you were telepathically connected.”

Peter grunts. He holds out the tube. “Spit.”

Yelena spits. 

“What are you gonna do with that?”

“I’m gonna run your genome against theirs,” he says of Nat and Mary, “see what’s missing and fill in the gaps. You’ll both be fine in a couple of hours.”

“And in the meantime,” Shuri pipes up, “I’d like to start the deprogramming process. If that’s alright, of course.”

Yelena shrugs. “Do whatever you have to. I’m sick of being someone else’s puppet.”

For her part, Mary hesitates. “I could help you,” she says to Peter. 

He knows she’s just scared, but a part of him still wants to say yes. Instead he shakes his head. “I’ll be fine.”

Mary shifts a little, nervous, and asks, “How long will the deprogramming take?”

Shuri hums. “I’ve adapted it since Barnes. The whole thing should only take me a couple of hours for each of you, but it might leave you a little shaken after.”

She goes on to explain the process in greater detail; something about synapses and serotonin injection. Peter is already absorbed in his own project to listen fully. 

Then Nat puts her hand on his arm. He startles a little. Her eyes narrow. “I left you a spit tube. I’m gonna take a nap.”

“Yeah,” Peter nods, heart still pounding. “Yeah, sounds good.”

* * *

MJ screws her face up through the pain. It’s been a stupid amount of time since her water broke and still no damn baby. 

“Everything’s gonna be fine,” Tony is saying to her right. “You’re with May, you’re in one of the best hospitals in New York—”

“You said this place was a cesspool of bacteria in the car ride over,” MJ snaps dryly.

“Oh, thanks,” May says, fiddling with MJ’s IV lines. “That means a lot.”

Tony pinches the bridge of his nose. “I deny ever having said such a thing in my life. Michelle, you have to be careful with the lying and slandering, okay? You never know when a TMZ writer is hiding in the air ducts.”

MJ rolls her eyes. She elects to ignore him as he rambles and instead shifts her attention onto her abdomen. She pokes it. “Do you think if I asked it nicely it would leave?”

May snorts. “I don’t think that’s how it works, hon.”

She falls back against the pillows. “It’s been _three hours._ What the hell is taking so long?”

“It’ll be ready when it’s ready,” she says, scrawling something on MJ’s chart. “Which’ll be soon, I promise.”

“And there’s no way we can like, delay it?” 

May shakes her head. “I already consulted with your OB and we both agreed we don’t wanna risk infection. Given that your water already broke and you’re dilating, it’s not a good idea. But you made it eight whole months, okay? It’ll be scary, but we have the means to keep the baby incubated until the lungs are fully developed.”

MJ nods. “Yeah. Okay.”

But it’s not okay. It’s the farthest fucking thing from it. She’s scared out of her mind, her stomach is in her ass, and if she thinks about it too long she starts to hyperventilate. Also, it _hurts._

“Hey,” May reaches out and smooths MJ’s bangs back. “I’m gonna be right here with you, okay? I’m not going anywhere.”

MJ’s throat feels thick, but she manages not to start crying. “Yeah,” she rasps. “Alright.”

* * *

It’s been a couple of hours. 

Yelena finishes first and then Mary goes under. The former looks a little ashen as she leaves the lab, announcing she needs to clear her head. Bucky starts after her, but Shuri advises him to leave her alone with her thoughts. 

Peter’s alone in one of the labs now and has been for a while, hunched over a screen and taking meticulous notes. 

Nat slinks in. 

“Get any sleep?”

“A catnap,” she says, perching beside him at the counter. “Explain it to me.”

Peter hesitates, looking up to think. 

“So like every eight or so years your cells regenerate, but for most people it’s like, um—like copying a song onto a tape and then letting someone copy the song on that tape onto _another_ tape, and after a while all the damage just accumulates and you’re left all grey haired and wrinkled and liver spotted, right? But with _you,_ it takes like, twice the normal length of time for your cells to cycle through the whole process. Well, that was the case before, but the new and improved formula is gonna make it take around three times as long.” 

Nat nods. She clearly has something else on her mind, and Peter has a good guess as to what it might be.

“I can’t stop seeing myself in that tank,” she whispers after a minute. “I don’t… _why_ would they do that?”

“I—” he tries to think of an answer but can’t. Frustrated, he shakes his head. “I don’t know, Nat.”

“I just…” her mouth twists and what comes next is hard to get out, he can tell; “am I even the first _me?”_

“Hey,” Peter reaches out to grab her hand and squeezes. “You can’t start thinking like that, okay? We’ll figure it out, we’ll get our answers, but just— _don’t_ right now. You’ll go crazy if you do that to yourself.”

Nat rests her forehead in her free hand. “I hate this.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Well at least you know you’re on your first body and not about to expire.”

Peter sighs and meets her eyes. “Nattie,” he says, “I’m gonna fix this for you, I promise.”

She nods, facade cracking a little, and lets him pull her into his arms to hold. 

* * *

Tony checks his watch. “Oh wow! We’re officially five hours in.” 

Michelle grunts. On a scale of one to ten, she’d said the pain was at a four, but knowing her that probably means an eleven. Tony would be lying if he said he wasn’t nervous. He’s been pacing the length of the room they’re keeping her in for the past half hour, alternatively checking his phone to make last-minute arrangements and checking on her. 

He runs over his mental list of important things one more time. Pepper is in Wakanda, Morgan is with Rhodes at the tower, Harley is manning SI, and Peter… Peter is still missing. 

And his kid is about to be born. 

It is decidedly not good. Tony can’t even find a silver lining in it. The whole thing just _sucks._

It’s also been getting him thinking. He’s having all kinds of intrusive, negative thoughts, like _is this how Mary Parker felt all those years ago? Is this how Pepper felt? What would it have been like if I’d been there for them?_

“Oh for the love of all that is good in this world, _stop pacing!”_

Tony freezes. He glares at the cartoon ghost decoration on the door and then turns to face her with his hands on his hips. “I have a lot of nervous energy that I’m trying to work off right now, thank you.”

“Oh, you’re nervous? _You’re_ nervous?” She laughs hysterically. “I’m about to push a _watermelon_ out of my _vagina.”_

Tony stares. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

She opens her mouth—probably to yell at him or something—but ends up wincing in pain. “God,” she gasps as the contraction ends. “Oh my god, that one hurt. I thought they were bad before but holy shit.”

Tony screams delicately into his hands. “Do you want May?”

“I want—” she presses the heels of her palms into her eyes. “I want a lot of things. I want this baby to come out of me already, I want Peter to be here, I—I want ice chips.”

He blinks. “I can do that last thing.”

* * *

Pepper’s heels echo on the marble floor. She holds her ledger against her chest as she walks, sure to keep a respectful distance between her and the guard leading her to the conference room. She’s done this before and knows the way herself, but understands that every precaution is necessary when it comes to royalty. 

Only, the guard isn’t taking her the usual way. He stops them in front of a set of doors and nods to her. “They’re inside.”

“They?” Pepper asks, brow furrowing. “I thought I was only meeting with T’Challa?”

The guard shrugs. “The others arrived a few hours ago. They’ve been very busy, so for convenience sake I have brought you to the labs. If this arrangement does not work for you I can speak to his highness—”

Pepper shakes her head. It takes her brain a few seconds to catch up. “The others,” she repeats, her stomach flipping. “Okay. Thank you.” 

The guard nods and steps back. Pepper, for her part, shoves through the doors.

Eight heads shoot up. 

Only one matters. 

His name, “Peter,” falls out of her mouth heavy like a rock. He opens his own mouth and then closes it, struggling. Then, 

“Hey, Pep.” 

Pepper takes a step forward. Stops. 

“Can you give us the room please?”

She doesn’t even know who the hell she’s asking to leave, hasn’t looked at anyone but Peter since she walked into the room. All she knows is that she needs to be alone with her son so she can… 

God, what? Scream? Cry? Hit him upside the head? Interrogate him? 

“Of course,” says T’challa’s voice. “Shuri, Okoye, come with me.”

“The rest of you, too,” Peter adds, almost reluctantly. “Please and thanks.” 

Pepper finally dares to rip her eyes away from Peter and watches Nat nod, grabbing Barnes by the arm to pull him out. Two other women follow, and the doors shut heavily behind them. 

For a second it’s just quiet. 

“Where the hell have you been?”

His shoulders sag. He grabs onto the back of a chair for support. “Does it even matter?”

“Yes,” she hisses, and then: “No, I don’t—maybe? Does it?”

Peter swallows. They’re standing exactly opposite the other with five feet of glass between them. Pepper can’t breathe. He doesn’t even seem to be able to stand. His voice is rough and ragged and overused, and there are dark circles beneath his eyes. 

This is her baby. This is the boy she took in after the worst loss of her life and raised as her own. This is the boy who danced with her in the kitchen at midnight on her birthday, who sat behind her while she gave birth to her daughter and coaxed her through contractions, who made her soup when she was sick and who called her every Friday without fail, just to give her the exclusive on the latest insanity happening at MIT. He has held her while she’s broken down; dropped to the floor with her, helped her stay standing. He is her _person._ He is the boy she’s been missing for half of a year and she needs to know _why._

“Peter,” she chokes out waveringly, “ _please_ talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”

He looks like he’s about to break, but she can’t let up. She _needs_ to know. “The woman who was standing next to you,” Pepper says suddenly, as she finally registers the face of a stranger, “who was she?”

“My mother.”

A pause: cataclysmic, irreparable, devastating. 

“My _birth_ mother,” he corrects after a beat, as if that fixes everything. 

“She’s not dead,” Pepper states. It’s a fact. He would never lie to her about something like that, which means he was lied _to._ “You’ve been with her, then? For six fucking months? On the run, violating every accord in the book, as if you had to become a fugitive to be with her? Like we wouldn’t _help her?!”_

“You’re misunderstanding the situation,” he whispers, shattered into a thousand tiny, tiny pieces and so _guilty._

It’s infuriating. She wants to be angry with him but can’t find it in her when he looks like a kicked puppy. He’s always been like that. 

“So explain it to me.”

“She was—she and Nat, the serum they were given, it was going bad. We had to find more or it was gonna kill them. It was—it was dangerous, Pepper—”

“Oh, don’t _give me that—”_

Peter puts his head in his hands and fists at his hair. 

“We didn’t want to drag the rest of you into it, okay? The less people breaking the laws, the better. Do you really think I _wanted_ to be gone? You think I _wanted_ to be away from you and Morgan and my own father and—” 

He stops, chest heaving, eyes wild.

Then, defeated, “We got nabbed up by Ross, Pep. I’ve been… I’ve been locked up for—I don’t even know what month it is. What month is it?”

Pepper feels a part of herself die. 

“October.”

“October,” he repeats, nodding. “Okay. Four months.”

She covers her mouth with her hand and has to physically choke down the sob threatening to crack her entire body into pieces. Her next breath is a sharp gasp. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “It wasn’t pretty.” 

She struggles with where to go next. Her mind is racing, her heart pounding, dread pooling in her stomach. “Are you—are you okay?”

A shrug. “I’m alive.”

Pepper reaches up to rake a hand through her hair and remembers that it’s tied back. A part of her wants to scream, but another part of her wholeheartedly understands exactly what that means, because for the past six months she’s been slowly convincing herself that he was dead and gone and never coming back again. 

But he’s alive. He’s here. Broken things can be fixed. 

Her free fist balls. She sucks in a deep breath, and still, “You shouldn’t have left.” 

His head hangs. “I know.”

“You should have asked for help. I would have _helped you,_ damn the fucking Accords, damn Ross!”

“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” he croaks. 

“Peter, baby, I would _die_ for you. Don’t you know that?”

Peter’s whole body jerks, but there’s still a table between them. “ _Mom…”_

She shakes her head, feeling borderline hysterical. “I should have been there for you. I should have been with you. God, what did they—what did they _do_ to you? I thought you were _dead,_ Peter—”

The next thing she knows, his arms are around her. He’d walked around while she was rambling on and now he holds her just like he always did before. Pepper breaks down in his arms and clings to him for dear life. 

He feels solid in her arms, _real,_ not like the dreams she has where she wakes up empty-handed and devastated. It’s Peter. He’s alive, and he’s with her, and he’s _safe_ now. A soldier returning from a war, wounded and twisted but still the same deep down under all the scars. 

“It wasn’t your fault,” he says, voice thick. “I swear to God. I’m so sorry, Pep. I’m so fucking sorry.”

It’s like something cracks. She holds him tighter. “It’s okay,” she says, and it’s practically a sob. “It’s okay, baby.”

“No it’s not.”

She squeezes the back of his neck and sniffs. “Don’t argue with me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Like always it makes her laugh. A few shaky breaths later and she can face him again. She reaches up to hold his face in her hands and wipe away the tears that are falling. 

Their foreheads touch. 

“I needed you.”

“I know that. I know I could’ve called in the first place, but everything happened so fast and if I’d told you, you and Tony would’ve tried to find me and then everything would be even more fucked up than it already was. I was trying to make sure you were safe by keeping you away.”

She wipes her own cheeks. “I believe you.”

“I _never_ wanted to hurt you. I’m so sorry, Mom.” 

Pepper shakes her head, more at herself; a silent refusal to break again. “It’s—I’m not—I get it. I think. I’m trying to, anyway. I’m trying _really_ hard, but I’ve spent so long planning out all the things I wanted to scream at you and now they’re just _gone_ and I don’t… I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to make of any of this.” She takes a step back so she can think and then it hits her like a fucking _train,_ the thing that he needs to know more than anything else at all. She looks back at him with wide eyes. 

“Pepper? What is it?”

“Peter… oh my god, there’s something I have to tell you about MJ.”

* * *

MJ starts freaking out around hour seven. 

The pain is getting progressively worse, moving in waves that ebb and flow but always come back stronger. It’s almost like period cramps, but a million times worse. She feels like she’s getting chainsawed instead of the usual stabbing sensations. 

She grits her teeth through the next one. They’re getting closer together, but May says they’re still ‘not close enough’. 

To her right, Tony wrings his hands. He seems like he’s afraid to cross a line. “Did you ever learn, uh—lamaze? Breathe in and out, y’know?” 

He starts to take really shallow, fast breaths that in no way would help MJ through the pain of these fucking contractions. She narrows her eyes. “Do you need a paper bag to heave into or something?”

Tony stops. Coughs. “I just—uh—” 

And MJ’s never really had a dad. She doesn’t get how the whole thing works, has never felt loved or cared for in the way that… 

In the way that _he_ has for her these past six months. 

“Just hold my hand,” she says, phrased like a demand but spoken with desperation. 

So Tony takes her hand, and somehow the next wave of pain seems more bearable. 

* * *

Steve is in the process of putting on his big flannel jacket when the landline rings. It used to be that only one other person knew the number, but now it’s a handful—including the kids, who like to crank call him sometimes—so he crams the receiver between his ear and shoulder as he buttons his cuffs. 

“Whoever this is, I was just on my way out the door, so make it snappy.”

“Hey sweetheart.”

Steve freezes. His heart stops in his chest and he falls back against the wall, stumbling a little to stay upright, relief coursing over him like getting doused in cold water. 

“Bucky,” he chokes. “ _Bucky._ ”

He can tell Bucky is smiling when he speaks next. “Yeah, it’s me. Thought I’d give you a little heads up. We’re coming back soon, Pete’s all haywire ’cuz he found out MJ’s pregnant. We should be pulling up in—I don’t know, maybe half an hour?”

Steve struggles to unpack all of that. He shakes his head to clear it. “Half an hour?” 

_Thirty minutes,_ he thinks. _I can do thirty more minutes._

“Okay,” he starts, “meet me at Queen’s Memorial, would you?”

“Why there? Don’t tell me you’re dying or something.” 

“No, no,” Steve bends to lace up his construction boots, “MJ’s in labour and Tony says she’s about to deliver.”

“Oh,” Bucky says quietly. “Oh, fuck.”

“Tell me about it.”

* * *

Tony looks up when Steve arrives, breathless and kind of frantic. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?! I called you eight times and—Tony? Why… why are you out here and not in there?”

Tony shakes his head, struggling to find the words. “They kicked me out,” he says. “She was—she was ready, and then something happened. I don’t know what, but she was—shit, Steve, she was crying and I couldn’t do anything to help her—”

He stops talking before he makes himself sick. Steve slowly sinks down into the chair next to him. “So you’re saying it’s bad?”

“I’m saying I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Steve nods quickly. “Okay, so—so we’ll wait for news. But Tony, they’re gonna be here any minute—”

“They? Who’s ‘they’?”

Steve swallows. “Buck. Nat. And uh, and Peter.”

At that, Tony literally clutches his heart and doubles over, head between his knees. “ _Cazzo,”_ he hisses. “Oh my god. You’re sure? He’s—he’s okay?”

Steve opens his mouth to speak, but doesn’t have to: suddenly Peter is there, he’s in the same room, he’s ten feet away and then five. Tony shoots to his feet and meets him in the middle, blindly pulling his son as close as he can. 

Peter holds him back. He’s smaller in Tony’s arms, frail and bony like he’s been malnourished and starved. Tony knows because he’s felt the same sharp ridges on his own body, the same jutting joints and sunken cheeks. He doesn’t ask. He closes his eyes and clings and sways them a little, hand moving to hold the back of Peter’s neck, shifting to kiss one cheek and then the other, and then his forehead and his nose. 

“My baby,” he whispers against Peter’s neck, the purest kind of relief making his knees weak. “Oh my god.” 

“Hi, dad,” Peter croaks. “Hi. Oh my god.”

Tony pulls back. He cups Peter’s face in his hands and studies him, stares into those eyes that are the same as his own. “What did they do to you?” he breathes. 

Peter looks away, face twisting, and then down at the tile flooring. “I’ll explain everything soon, I promise. God, I’m so sorry, dad.” 

“No,” Tony shakes his head. “No sorrys, okay?” 

He doesn’t care. He _knows_ that look, the hunted, haunted one. He doesn’t need answers because he already has them. MJ was right: he was gone so long because he was being held by someone. 

“Dad—” Peter breaks off, but Tony knows. 

“She’s, uh,” he sucks in a sharp breath. “They’re doing everything they can.”

He re-focuses on Tony, frowning. “What does that mean? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Tony says helplessly. “They wouldn’t tell me, kiddo, they just pushed me out. Said they needed room and—someone mentioned something about prepping an OR—”

“An OR?!” Peter demands wildly, ripping away and stepping toward the line none of them can cross. “I don’t—I don’t understand—”

“Neither do I, but if you go back there you’ll only freak her out and get in the way, okay? Just do me a huge favour here and stay planted?”

Peter opens his mouth, clearly distressed, and then runs a hand down his face. “Okay,” he says shakily. “Yeah, okay.”

He’s still staring at the doors to the maternity ward when the others round the corner. Tony’s heart settles a little more at the sight of Pepper. 

“Did you have to run off like that, ace?!” Barnes demands. 

Steve makes a little choking sound and shoots to his feet. 

“Buck,” he says, and Barnes is already moving with the intention of meeting him halfway. They kiss roughly, and there’s just so much _shit_ packed into it Tony just has to look away even if all he wants to do is oogle. 

“You okay?” Steve asks when he pulls back, voice softer than Tony’s ever heard it. 

“M’good,” Barnes replies, voice equally low. “Didn’t mean to keep you waiting so long.”

“That’s okay. You did what you had to do. Is that her?”

He jerks his chin at a blonde woman standing off to the side. She’s leaning against the reception counter and eyeing them dryly. 

“Yelena? Yeah. But be careful, she bites.”

Yelena, hearing this, grins and snaps at Rogers. He raises an eyebrow and Barnes outright laughs. 

Tony feels his chest go right. He glares at Steve but doesn’t have time to process the fact that the other man fucking _lied_ again, because—

“Stark.”

He’s on his feet already, but he has the ridiculous urge to stand twice at the sight of the woman who should be long-dead. 

Mary Parker smiles at him. It’s not unkind. 

“You’re, uh—you’re alive,” Tony says, which of course was something he knew already, but it’s an entirely different thing to _see_ her. 

“For now, but you never know with me.” Mary Parker holds out her hand. Dazed, Tony shakes it. 

“Fuck,” Peter says abruptly, sinking down into the nearest chair. He looks pale and shaken. “ _Fuck.”_

Tony’s right there with him, both emotionally and physically. He and Pepper hover close, but they’re careful not to crowd him. They have a silent conversation over his head. 

_Do you think he’s okay?_ Tony asks with his eyes. 

Pepper responds by narrowing her own, which means, _Do I think he’s okay? Fucking look at him, Tony, he’s dead on his feet._

Chastened, Tony sits beside his son. He grabs his wrist, the rest of the world forgotten, Mary Parker be damned. He starts timing his pulse. “Thready,” he assesses. “You’re peaky.”

“Who cares?” Peter demands. 

“I do,” Tony and Pepper both snap. “Very much so,” Tony adds. “Have you eaten? When was the last time you slept?”

Peter has to think about it. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” Tony repeats, and something inside of him breaks hearing it. But now is not the time for him to wig out. He’s the dad now, it’s his job to be a rock. “Okay, that’s okay. I’m gonna—I’ll get you something to eat, okay?” 

Peter nods, and so Tony stands and marches pointedly toward the vending machines. He pretends to be deep in thought as Mary Parker sidles up to him like a skittish deer. 

“So that’s it?” He asks her, quiet but no less harsh. “You just show up out of nowhere, no excuses, and you _drag my son off to god knows—”_

“Our son.”

“Pardon?”

“ _Ours.”_ Mary clicks the B4 button. Twix—Peter’s favourite. “And I’m not saying that it was justified, but I did what I did to keep him safe. I’ll stand by that decision until the day that I die, however much it all hurt.”

“Parker—”

“Petrov. My name is Petrov.”

“Yeah? Since when?”

“Since I’m done hiding. I’ve been a lot of people, Stark. I’m getting older and the bad men are getting smaller and smaller. For once I think it’s safe enough to just be myself.”

He fidgets. Clicks the stupid Twix button. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here for our son,” she replies, ripping into the candy bar. “And our grandkid. Wherever they are is where I want to be. Problem with that?”

“Not that I think you’d listen anyway, but yes.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t trust you.”

“Why, because I lied to you to get into bed with you?”

His eye twitches. “Partly.”

“Relax, it wasn’t personal.”

“Maybe not to you.”

“Don’t tell me you went and fell in love with me, Stark.”

“No, but we did have a kid together, if you recall.”

Mary swallows. “No. I had a kid with Richard. Then he died and I died with him, and it took me _years,_ but here I am again all patched up and brand new.”

He grits his teeth. “You should have told me.”

“I know.” Her mouth twists. “But at the time, I didn’t think so. The only thing I knew about you was that you had just lost two of the most important people in your life. You’d had an entire company thrust onto your shoulders and the responsibility was killing you. Do you really think I wanted to add a baby to the mix?”

“Oh, _don’t._ Don’t act like you did it for _me.”_

“I didn’t,” she hisses, temper finally lost. “I did it for _him._ Everything I’ve done since the day he was born, it’s all been for Peter.”

“If I had known—”

“You could have been a good father,” Mary says. “ _Maybe._ But I didn’t know, and I wasn’t taking chances on maybes when it came to my kid. I was afraid. I was nineteen years old and I was scared out of my mind because I didn’t think… I didn’t think I was gonna be able to love him the way other mothers loved their babies. But I was wrong. And I’m sorry I never gave you the chance to prove me wrong, too.”

Tony squints at her. She’s undeterred and takes a bite of her candy bar, squinting right back. 

“This family has officially reached new levels of weird,” a new voice says, and Tony turns to find Nat standing there with raised eyebrows and her arms folded across her chest, unimpressed as usual. 

“I was just…” he waves the Twix, “retrieving refreshment.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Would you like—?”

“Tony,” Nat gives him a little shove toward the waiting area, “go sit with your wife and wait for your grandkid to get out of surgery, okay?”

“And what about you?”

Nat sighs. She meets Mary’s eyes. “I have to go tell Laura that Clint is dead.” 

* * *

“Clint is dead?” 

Tony’s strained demand carries across the room, and Steve’s blood goes cold at the words. He rounds on Buck. “ _Clint is dead?”_

For whatever reason, he finds himself standing up and moving toward Tony and Nat, heart hammering. They’re the last of them, the last of the first six Avengers, now that Bruce and Thor are off-world again and Clint is—

“How?” Tony asks. “What—what the hell…”

Steve grabs him. Tony clings. There’s no time for resentment just now; this is family, this is their history, this is their _brother._

Nat looks worse than he’s ever seen her. Steve had noticed it when she’d arrived, but now there’s a sense to the gravity around her, a reason for the darkness in her eyes. 

“He was trying to help,” she says shortly. “Didn’t work out.”

Tony is rubbing at his chest. “I don’t understand.” 

“Well, I don’t have time to explain it right now,” Nat tells them, and there are tears in her eyes even though she’s trying to keep her voice level and her face impassive. “Petya,” she calls, “I’m going.”

He looks up at her, torn. “Are you sure you wanna do that right now?”

“I have to,” she says. “Laura needs to know. Will you—will you be okay?” 

Peter’s eyes flit from her to Tony and then back again. He nods jerkily and then stands, pulling her into his arms and kissing her forehead. “Will you?”

Steve can’t hear whatever it is she tells him, but he nods. Then,

“I should come too.”

They all whip around to look at Mary, who for once doesn’t seem sure of herself. Steve feels dizzy, like he’s watching some kind of daytime soap opera but in real life with people he actually cares about. 

“Mary,” Peter says, voice holding an edge now, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

Nat nods. “Me either. This is something I need to do alone.” 

“But it was my fault—”

“No one blames you,” Nat says brokenly, almost like she wants to believe it but can’t quite. She ducks her head and wipes her cheek. Sniffs. “I should go.”

Peter nods. “Take the Quin.”

“Yeah,” she swallows. “Call me when there’s news.”

Then she’s gone.

* * *

It’s been an hour without an update. 

Peter stands outside in the bitter October cold, watching cars pass on the street and kids run down the sidewalk. Half are in costumes and half aren’t. 

It’s fucking _Halloween._ He hadn’t even realised until he’d seen the cheesy decor around the hospital. 

Peter’s ears perk at the sound of the automatic doors sliding open to admit someone else. He doesn’t have to look to know who it is. 

“Fancy seeing you here,” Pepper says around her Marlboro filter, and then, “got a light?”

Peter’s lip quirks up. His voice is raspy when he says, “Lost it.”

Pepper nods. She fishes around in her own coat pockets and produces one, and they pass the cigarette back and forth for a little while. 

“Do you want to talk about Clint?”

Peter shakes his head. 

“How about Ross?”

At that, he gives her a look. Pepper sighs out smoke. “I just don’t want you bottling things up.”

“I don’t really think now is the time either way,” Peter says shortly. Then, regretting it, “I’m sorry. Fuck, I’m just tired.”

Pepper doesn’t look the slightest bit offended, though. She just nods. “I know, sweetie.”

He’s quiet for a moment, trying to sort through the shit-storm of thoughts, to find something coherent to say or ask. He finally chokes out, “Does she hate me?”

Pepper’s whole demeanour softens. “No. God, no. If anything she blamed herself.”

“Blamed herself?” He repeats, unable to wrap his head around it. “For what?”

“Peter,” she says, softer than he’s heard in a while, “baby, we both know you weren’t happy.”

He blinks, struck. “Pardon?”

“You were overwhelmed, over _worked._ Tony knew it, MJ knew it—hell, I knew it and I still kept… god, I’ve spent these last few months alternating between regretting making you head of R&D, and wanting to scream at you until I passed out. I felt like I—” her breath hitches and her voice shakes, “I was so scared I had driven you away.”

Peter shakes his head. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t _anyone’s_ fault but mine, okay? No one made that choice for me.”

Pepper smiles in a sad, broken kind of way. She reaches up and strokes his flushed cheek. “We all still love you. You know that, right? You know you could never do anything that would make me stop loving you?”

He feels like his knees are gonna buckle soon. Peter’s eyes burn and he sinks with the weight of her words, dropping down onto his ass to sit on the cold, hard sidewalk. 

Pepper kneels down next to him. “Peter?”

“What if she dies?” he whispers, terrified to no end. “What if I never get to tell her I’m sorry? What if I never get to talk to her again—?”

He can’t stop thinking about it: her, here and all alone, pregnant and not knowing when he’d be back or if he was even alive. He starts to shake a little bit, stomach turning, wondering what the hell he was thinking running off like that. 

He should’ve turned around. 

He should never have left her close the door behind him that night. 

“She’s not gonna die,” Pepper says firmly, like it’s a rule, like it’s a law. “You’re gonna talk to her, and you’re gonna tell her how sorry you are, and then you’re gonna raise my grandbaby together, okay? No more what ifs, hear me? Don’t let yourself think like that.”

Peter nods. He draws in a shaky breath and looks at her, vision still a little blurry. “I really missed you.”

She takes his hand. It’s such a small thing, but it’s everything, too. “I missed you too, baby. So much. God, you have no idea.”

But he does. He really, really thinks he does.

* * *

May stops dead when she sees him. 

She’s in her bright pink scrubs with her surgical mask hanging off of one ear, hair plastered to her forehead with sweat, and her eyes are wide. 

Peter is already standing. He’d been leaning against the back of Buck’s chair, listening to his dad talk to Rhodey on the phone, checking up on Morgan— _Morgan—_ and then she’s just there, shouldering through the swinging doors, ten feet away at most. 

“Okay,” May says, sucking in a sharp breath, clearly trying to get her bearings. “Okay. _Madonna mia._ Jesus Christ.”

“Hi, May.”

“Don’t you ‘hi’ me, young man. Oh my _god._ ” 

Peter’s dad reaches for her, grabbing her forearm to keep her upright and steady. May leans on him gratefully and closes her eyes, one hand over her stomach like she’s trying to fight down the urge to be sick. 

“It’s not good,” she says to them at large, and Peter feels a decade shave off his lifespan just with those words. His hair is probably grey at this point. “It’s—it’s worse than most early pregnancies. It started going bad because the baby was breech, and when they tried to turn her, the doctor felt—”

May closes her eyes and takes another deep breath. “The baby has what’s called ectopia cordis. It’s an extremely rare condition where… where the heart accidentally grows on the outside of the baby’s body. We would have caught it early, but there was the thing with the ultrasounds and so—so we didn’t.”

Peter doesn’t know what she’s talking about. His mind is racing a mile a minute. The world is spinning at the same speed, but in a different direction. 

“The doctors are doing everything they can,” May says, voice shaking, “but MJ’s lost a lot of blood. They’re both in surgery right now.” 

Peter feels someone’s hand clasp around his shoulder. Bucky, it’s Bucky. 

“Sit down, kid.”

Peter doesn’t bother arguing. He drops into the seat and Bucky hovers next to him, still gripping his arm to ground him. Peter stares at the floor and keeps staring even when May finally notices Mary, even when she lets out a string of distressed curses in Italian and then snaps, “I’ll yell at you later. I need to go be with MJ.”

Then she retreats back into the surgical wing and leaves them all out there, stunned and powerless to do anything.

* * *

Time fades in and out. Peter sits there in the world’s most uncomfortable hospital chair and stays completely silent. He doesn’t move. He barely breathes. He stares at the doors waiting for May to come back, or anyone, really. 

Anyone with answers. Anyone with news, and preferably only the good kind. 

The baby’s heart is on the outside of its body. MJ’s lost a lot of blood. _It doesn’t look good._

He can’t think anything else. There _is_ nothing else; just these moments stretched out into forever, voices indistinct, touches unfelt. He’s fallen so far inside his own body he doesn’t know if he can ever climb out of his stomach again. 

And then—

“Who’s the father?”

There’s a nurse standing there with a clipboard, staring expectantly. 

Peter croaks, “I am.”

She nods. “Follow me, please?”

Peter stands, dazed, and barely feels his dad squeeze his arm in passing before he follows the nurse behind the doors May had stormed through—God, what, hours ago? 

“Is MJ okay?”

The nurse slows a little. “We don’t know that yet. She’s still in surgery at the moment, but I promise they’re doing everything they can to fix her.”

“What… what happened, exactly?”

“It was rough on her,” the nurse says. Her tag reads ANNE. “She hemorrhaged giving birth and because of the baby’s condition, the doctors had to perform an emergency C-section. I’m not quite sure what her condition is right now seeing as I’m not on her case, I’m a NICU nurse.”

“Oh,” Peter says quietly. “So, um, the baby?”

“Your daughter?” She asks, and Peter has never heard two words more strange and magnificent in his entire life. The sound of them is like downing twelve shots of espresso. His _daughter._

“She’s just around the corner,” Anne says. “If you want to meet her alone, I can give you the rundown out here. You’ll have to wear one of the scrub gowns, and there’s a hand washing station right in front of the door that you’ll have to use every time you leave and enter the NICU.”

Peter nods, not quite processing that information. He’s now staring through the glass-panelled wall, scanning the rows of incubated babies.

“She’s stable for now, but I’m afraid her prognosis isn’t good. Around 80% of babies born at 27 weeks survive, but only 10% of infants born with ectopia cordis do. The doctors…” Anne hesitates, “they don’t expect her to last through the night.”

Peter whips around. He tries to speak but finds he can’t. 

Anne seems to understand that. “She’s gonna be really small, and she’ll have a lot of wires hooked up to her—IV lines, heart rate monitor, oxygen—and there’s—there’s gonna be a big scar.”

Peter takes a deep breath. Nods. 

“Are you ready?”

“Yeah,” he rasps. “I’m ready.”

* * *

It’s three in the morning. It’s quiet. There’s a little glass isolette with the name BABY JONES-PARKER written in bold capital letters on a sticker. 

She’s very small, and just looking at her is sort of terrifying, with all of the wires Anne mentioned and the stitches keeping her chest closed and the oxygen mask covering half of her face. For a minute he just stands there running the statistics over again in his head: about 80% of babies born at 27 weeks survive; only 10% of infants born with ectopia cordis do. She is not expected to last the night. 

Peter puts his hand on the case. 

“Hi. Wow, look at you,” he whispers, awed. “You come with a little hat and everything.” 

His daughter doesn’t really react to his presence. She’s deep in sleep, her chest rising and falling in a way that isn’t quite normal, just like Anne had told him on the way in. The pattern is irregular; the pauses between breaths are too long. 

He stares at the stitched-up wound on her chest. She’d been born with her heart on her sleeve and they’d had to put it back inside. He doesn’t know what to make of that at all. 

“So I know we haven’t met yet,” Peter goes on, voice strained, “and I don’t wanna freak you out or anything, but um—I’m dad.”

Nothing happens, really. The world doesn’t shift on its axis. The NICU is still silent, aside from the beeping of monitors and the whoosh of ventilators. 

But he _feels_ different. _Everything_ feels different. One look at this very, _very_ tiny baby in a too-big hat, and all of the sudden she’s the focal point of the entire universe. There is nothing, absolutely _nothing,_ that he wouldn’t do for her. 

Hesitantly, Peter reaches through the hole in the glass. 

Then he stops.

( _If everything works out the way I want it to, you’ll be the most efficient killing machine known to man._

_You’re dangerous._

_If they get inside your head, there’s no telling what you’ll be capable of._

_You killed them. Ross, the handlers—all of ‘em._ ) 

Peter bites down on his lip, hard. Does he deserve this? Does she? Is he good enough for her? Is he good at all? 

His baby makes a little mewling sound and the decision is made for him, just like that. 

Blindly, instinctually, he touches her arm. Feeling, committing her to memory; he touches all of her little fingers and all of her toes. She doesn’t stir again, but he still pulls up a chair to sit beside her crib anyway. 

“God,” he says, after a few minutes of just straight staring. He blinks abruptly only to find that there are tears in his eyes starting to burn and tickle. 

He keeps running his thumb up and down the length of her arm. She’s so tiny, it’s fucking terrifying. He’s so afraid he might break her. 

“I feel like I have a lot of explaining to do. I know I should’ve been here, and if you could understand everything, you’d be just as mad at me as I am at myself. But I swear to God, if I’d known I would’ve been here. I’m _so_ sorry. I just—I’m here now. And I’m not going anywhere, and so if you could just—if you could just do Daddy a really big favor and fight super hard to just—just stay with me? ’Cuz I really wanna get to know you, and I’d miss you like crazy so just… stay. Okay? Just stay with me.”

Nothing changes, but she breathes again and that’s everything. 

“You’re okay, Boo,” he whispers. “You’re gonna be just fine, alright? I’m right here and I’m never leaving again, I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is literally my child so!!! i hope it was alright
> 
> also sidenote the russian Ironman protein bars are a real thing and i HOWLED when i discovered them


	7. soup + saltines

  
The quiet whir of the NICU doors opening doesn’t even get him to look up.

Peter is still staring at his daughter when someone clears their throat behind him—and it’s May, he knows that from the smell of her perfume and the way her feet fall against the floor. He’s afraid to turn around and meet her eyes just then, afraid of what he’ll see.

And it’s May, so she knows that. She sits down beside him instead, runs a hand through his hair while he watches the rising and falling of his daughter’s chest. He hadn’t realised how much he’d missed her touch and leans into it a little, feeling stupidly kiddish despite the fact that he’s just become a dad.

“MJ’s gonna be okay,” May whispers softly.

Peter whips around at that, feels the relief fall from his back like Atlas shucking the sky after a long day of straining, bending, bleeding. He smiles, _really_ smiles, for the first time in months. “Yeah?”

May nods. She’s still playing with his hair, absentminded and gentle. “She’s just sleeping off the anesthesia right now. It shouldn’t be too much longer. You can go and sit with her until she wakes up if you want.”

The relief is quickly replaced with anxiety. Peter’s gaze cuts back to his daughter, who’s so tiny and fragile and very possibly dying right now. “I—May…”

He doesn’t think he’s ever felt this torn in his entire life, not even when she’d come back from the dead and he’d had to decide who was going to be the mother: her or Pepper.

Eventually he’d stopped being an idiot and realised that it could be both, but this isn’t the same.

May understands this too, however, and swipes her thumb across his cheekbone, brushing away the tear he hadn’t even realised had fallen. “I can sit with her.”

She doesn’t specify which ‘her’ she’s talking about, but it doesn’t matter either way; he’s already made up his mind. There’s no one on this planet he trusts more than May Parker to watch his daughter, and so he plants a fat one on her forehead and rises.

Then,

“Do you… um, do you think—?”

May’s eyes are watery, but her grip is strong when she grabs his arm. “I think she’s stable, and I’ll come and get you if absolutely anything changes, okay?”

Peter nods. He doesn’t even have the words to thank her, but he squeezes her hand nonetheless and spares his daughter one last glance before he goes.

* * *

MJ feels sick before she even opens her eyes. 

In the haze between sleep and waking, she pieces what she remembers together: the fear, the strange slipping sensation of losing consciousness, May brushing her bangs back and telling her everything was gonna be okay. 

Only it’s not okay and she knows it, can feel it right down to her bones. 

But she does open her eyes, and even if everything isn’t okay, right in that moment at least one less thing is wrong.

He’s got his chin resting on his knee and he’s watching her, has been for who knows how long. He’s sitting in one of those uncomfortable hospital chairs, pale and exhausted. There can’t be any more than two feet between them.

And it’s not like she’d expected him to be there. She hadn’t expected it and her entire body tenses as a result, but then she thinks, _of fucking course._

Of course he would be here. Of course he would come back right before she could give up on him entirely. 

“Hey, Em.”

For a minute she just stares at him, and her chest is so tight and her blood is boiling and she’s so mad, she’s _furious,_ but—

(sunken cheekbones, the tense way he’s holding his body like he’s waiting to get mauled by an animal; and worse, that impossibly soft look on his face.

MJ had forgotten it. She’d forgotten the accompanying rush of warmth, the way her bones settled and her heart beat a little slower. Her breath catches and)

“Pause?”

Peter looks like he could cry from relief. He nods eagerly. “Pause.”

MJ tries to sit up. His entire body jerks forward as a result. “Don’t—”

She sits up anyway and glares at him, even though he was probably right. She hurts like hell everywhere, and she’s sore and there’s bleeding, but—

“The baby?”

“In the NICU with May,” he whispers. “She’s…”

He’s struggling to find the words. MJ can only croak, “‘She’?”

“You didn’t know?”

Silently, MJ shakes her head.

She’s seen a lot of people just break before, seen it happen with tons of kids in her sessions with them, but it’s another thing entirely to watch it happen to this stupid idiot that she loves with every fibre of her being.

Peter’s gaze flits down to the bed. He’s not sure if he’s allowed to sit, not sure if it’s okay to be so close.

MJ grabs his arms and physically _pulls_ him.

Peter makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat. He sinks down beside her and they’re touching, he’s real. She’s all wrapped up in his strange new smokewood smell, and even with her mind reeling she doesn’t miss the way he’s still terrified, still holding himself like he’s made of stone.

“Peter,” she rasps, desperate, “what _happened?”_

MJ isn’t even sure which she’s asking about: where in the hell he’s been for the last six months? The delivery? Or maybe it’s his fucked up, haunted expression, or all of it at the same time. 

Peter presses his palms against his eyes and blinks, unfocused. “She’s so fucking _small._ There are all these wires and tubes, and we can’t even hold her. We can’t even— _fuck.”_

His voice breaks toward the end, which is really the thing that makes her start crying. Her throat burns with it and her eyes sting from it but she fights it back. She won’t cry right now. She has to be strong. For herself, for him. For all three of them. 

But a strangled sob still stubbornly and pathetically escapes before she can pacify it. 

The sound snaps him out of his daze. He moves, holds her face in his hands like it’s second nature, not even stopping to think because it’s just ingrained in him by now. Even at their most broken, he’s still willing to touch her jagged edges with his paper-thin skin. “MJ…”

That’s all he says. Just her name. 

It’s enough. 

( _Why_ is it enough? It shouldn’t be enough. 

It is.) 

MJ knows she’s still supposed to be pissed off, but he’s so _warm._ She doesn’t even think about stopping him when he kisses her. She probably should, but she doesn’t. 

Maybe it’s because he’s warm and tastes like salt, or because he pulls back the way the ocean does, leaving her inches deeper in the sand of it, of the love.

“I’m so fucking sorry. I don’t even know what else to say. I should’ve been with you, I know I should have. I had no idea I was gonna be gone this long, but I would have come back sooner if I could have. I didn’t have a _choice—”_

“Hey,” she puts her hands on his, pulls them down to hold. “No. We’re paused, remember? Just tell me about the baby. Is she gonna be okay? Is she—?”

Peter sucks in a sharp breath. Wipes her left cheek with his shirt sleeve, and then her right. “They, um,” his voice is shaking, “they don’t think she’s gonna last the night, MJ.”

It takes her a minute to even process what he’s just said to her, all of the implications around those words. She squeezes her eyes shut tight, fingers curling in her hair to dig into her scalp. 

Nauseous, she asks, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

He has to explain it to her twice through and even then it’s just not registering. MJ’s head is heavy and throbbing. She’s sore but it doesn’t matter, more tired than she’s ever been before but it doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters except her daughter.

So she says, “Okay,” and then, “I wanna see her.”

Peter makes a weak sound of distress. “I don’t know if you should. I mean, you just had major surgery—”

“You think I care?!” she sounds hysterical and feels hysterical, too, throwing the thin waffled blanket back and trying to scoot forward off the bed, “I don’t give a fuck if I rip my stitches open again, Peter, I’m gonna see our little girl before she dies.”

She’s always been too blunt for him, too harsh for all his soft. Peter winces but can’t seem to find it within himself to argue her back down. He runs a hand over his hair.

“Okay. Jesus, okay. I’ll find a wheelchair.”

* * *

May chokes on her coffee when they enter.

She scrambles to save the chart she’d been writing in, clumsily setting it aside and swallowing roughly. “Oh my god? You should _not_ be out of bed, MJ.”

“Relax, I have an escort,” MJ points out. “How is she?”

May’s shoulder’s sag a little. MJ can’t tell if it’s with relief or exhaustion. “She’s still sleeping.”

“No problems?” Peter asks over MJ’s head.

May’s reply is, “No,” but what MJ really hears is, “Not yet.”

Quietly, May goes on to explain everything in greater detail. She tells MJ what happened in the delivery room: she’d hemorrhaged so they’d done a last minute C-section. The baby had needed emergency heart surgery and though it went as well as it could have, there’s still a lot of risk. 

May adopts a practised tone of patience while she lays out all the awful shit they’re dealing with. She answers all of their dumb questions, explains to MJ about how they’ll handle breastfeeding through a feeding tube, shows them all of the equipment and what it’s for. 

“Listen,” she says, “We’ll need to keep a close eye on her for a while, but as long as she’s stable, she’s gonna be fine. I’ll leave the three of you alone for a minute, so just come and get me if anything happens.” 

Peter nods. He kisses May’s cheek before she slips out and once she’s gone, MJ slowly closes the gap between herself and her daughter. 

And sure, MJ hadn’t been expecting to see a made-for-TV baby or anything. She’d known to expect peach fuzz on the body, pink skin that could darken in time. But no amount of books or articles or talks from May could have prepared her for _this._

Her baby is so fucking _small._

MJ grabs blindly for Peter. “Help me stand.”

“Emmie, I—”

“Peter,” she cuts across, voice dangerous, “help me stand. _Please._ ”

He bites his lip, considering, and then moves to help her. She used to hate the feeling of security that being near him provided, used to resent it with every molecule of her body, but god if she hasn’t been craving it for _so_ fucking long. 

When she stumbles, still dizzy, he keeps her upright. His grip only slackens when she regains some semblance of balance. 

“You good?”

A nod. 

His arms fall away. MJ feels cold without them, but doesn’t say anything. Instead she watches him circle the glass incubator to stand opposite her. They both look down. 

“Do you see the way her eyes are moving back and forth like that? Holy shit, she’s dreaming.” Peter’s face is cracked open and full of awe. “What do you think it’s about?”

“The cruel crushing of my cervix against the walls of her primordial goop bubble?”

Just like that they’re both laughing. They have to shut each other up so they don’t wake up all the other too-tiny babies. MJ feels borderline delusional. She’s lost her bearings and become a spinning compass. 

That is, until she notices the two big brown eyes staring up at her, wide with curiosity and innocence and wonder. They’re the exact same shade as Peter’s, but the shape is all MJ. 

“Oh,” she says stupidly. “Hi.”

Suddenly there’s nothing funny about it. There’s only the sheer terror of reality: her baby girl, flushed and squirming around all those wires; she can’t breathe right, and the stitches in her chest are so deep, and her hands are so small. Worst of all: MJ can’t even hold her or feed or anything. 

Still, she reaches inside the incubator and carefully strokes her daughter’s puffy little cheek. “Hey you,” MJ whispers. “I know you. Do you remember me? We chilled together for like, a good eight months? I used to read to you?”

Peter starts. “You did?” 

MJ shrugs. “She likes physics textbooks.” 

“Wow.” He looks a bit like he might melt or something, all wide-eyed and dorky, grinning. “What a little nerd.” 

MJ hums in agreement. Her hand travels down to stroke her daughter’s arm, and then her hand. All she wants to do is hold her, but she can’t. She can’t do anything except stand here and watch, waiting for the inevitable.

“I wish I’d been with you,” Peter whispers after a few moments in the thick of their tension-filled silence. 

MJ bites the inside of her cheek. “You’re here now.”

“But I—”

“Peter,” she snaps, and he shuts right up because he knows that tone. “I am so fucking angry at you I could… I don’t even know what I could do. I’m furious, and I’m hurt, but you were _already hurting_ and I didn’t… I didn’t _see it._ It was my fucking _job_ to see it and I didn’t, and you were in so much pain—for fuck’s sake, you _died—_ and I just let it go. I let all of it go when I should have been paying attention, and then you were stretched so thin and I was just trying to take more and more from you—”

“Stop it—”

“It’s on me too,” she states firmly. “It wasn’t just you. So you can be mad at me if you want.”

“I’m not mad at you.”

“Well that just makes it _worse._ Would you just like, say something rude to me for once in your life?”

He scrambles. “You scare me more than the Duolingo bird.”

“I said _rude,_ not romantic.”

He smiles, but it fades with unease. “That night,” he starts shakily, “you said you felt like I was only with you to have a kid with you.”

She’d been expecting this. Every time she’d wasted even half a heartbeat imagining what it would be like when he came back, even in the fantasies with the best outcomes, those words always cropped back up: _sometimes it feels like you just want the kid and not me._

“Peter—” 

“I thought we were taking turns.”

MJ stops. Purses her lips and waits. 

Peter takes a deep breath. “I just need you to know that I _hate_ that you felt that way. I hate that I did anything to make you think I could _ever_ love you any less than I do. I’m not—” he pinches his brow, “I didn’t want you to be around the person I was with Nat, because I didn’t like that person. I still don’t. When I’m with her I can be bitter and ruthless and I’m—I’m _bad._ I didn’t want to be bad in front of you. I didn’t wanna—I didn’t want you to know I could be like that. I don’t,” his voice breaks and he looks away, eyes full of tears. “I feel like I lost track of who used to be and I just can’t fucking stand myself anymore.”

MJ feels literal revulsion at his last few words. There has never been a more disgusting sentence in the English language and she _fully_ disagrees, but can’t bring herself to interrupt his rambling. 

“When I’m with you it’s different. You make me feel safe. You make me feel like it’s okay to let my guard down, like it’s okay to not be strong for a little while. I was just trying so hard to hold onto that, trying to hide who I’d become and I—” he stops, brow furrowed. “This sounds like a bunch of bullshit excuses. Fuck, I’m sorry. I’m just trying to explain the how’s and why’s.” 

MJ studies him: his sloped shoulders, the bags under his eyes, the brittleness of him. It’s like he’s in danger of snapping under the weight of his own body, like the things he’s carrying on his back are so heavy he’ll fall through the floor any second. 

“Peter?”

“Yeah?”

“Would it help if I told you that I forgive you?”

He looks like she just told him she’s a secret Flat Earther. “Pardon? What? _Why?”_

MJ rolls her eyes. “Well for one thing, I get the feeling that whatever it is you’ve been going through the past few months means you’re gonna need more help than ever—”

“I don’t want you to just let it all go because you pity me, MJ.”

“That’s not what I meant,” MJ says quickly, going over to his side now. “I just… I was hurt, Peter. I felt like I was losing you and it was scaring the shit out of me, but I didn’t mean most of the things I said. Or I did, but I don’t anymore. I don’t really know. To be honest, I’ve been so worried about you I kind of forgot whatever the hell it was I was mad at you for in the first place.”

“Again, kind of questionable reasoning, but I’ll take it.”

She always feels a tug in her gut when they’re close like this. There’s a sensation like an elevator dropping, a magnetic pulling. It’s like she’s just gotten high again after six months sober and the rush is threatening to draw her under, yank her down into the bottomless depths. 

MJ traces his jaw with her thumb. “I love you with everything in me. That’s reason enough.” 

His fingers ghost her waist. Their noses brush. “Emmie?”

“Yeah?”

“I missed you,” he murmurs, lips ghosting her cheek now. He kisses her there and then moves to her temple, and then the crown of her head. “God, I missed you like crazy.” He tilts her head back when he gets to her mouth, his palm against the jumping veins in her neck, shaking like they’re sixteen again and he’s forgotten how to do this, forgotten how to touch her. 

MJ loops her arms around his stomach and presses against him, chin against chest. “I missed you, too.”

They stay like that for what feels like forever, fingers curled in fabric, breathing and listening and clinging. She feels like a plant burgeoning under the sun after a week-long storm: finally he’s here to look at, finally that miserable cold will leave her veins and she’ll know heat again. 

Then MJ leans back. She brushes his tears away like he’d done for her. “You can do bad things and I’ll still be here, Peter. You know that, right? You know I’m not the one that makes you good?” 

“But you make me wanna stay good,” he croaks, and looks a little bit like he’s dying. “I should never have left.”

“No,” MJ agrees, holding his stupid face, “and I shouldn’t have kicked you out.” 

He looks down at the floor and so MJ kisses his hair, running her fingers through it, recalling the little sounds he used to make from memory and feeling goosebumps erupt when he makes them again now. 

“We don’t have to talk about any more of this right now, okay?” 

“You’re just letting it go?”

Her eyebrows go up. “Well, what were you expecting exactly? Divorce papers?”

Peter blushes. “I wasn’t even sure if we’d broken up or not. Are we? Broken up, I mean? Did we—?”

“Baby, we have a kid together. We’re like, married. And setting something aside doesn’t mean letting it go, it just means we’re both agreeing to bottle up our feelings until there’s time to actually give the issue the attention it deserves. The baby’s more important right now.”

“Right,” he nods. “Baby. Speaking of which: we have to come up with some kind of name for her. If we don’t I’ll go absolutely feral soon.” 

* * *

“Indiana.”

“We’re not naming her after the dog.”

“Why not?! It could be like a really cool Indiana Jones thing!” 

MJ pinches her brow. She’s leaning against him as they sit shoulder-to-shoulder. Her back hurts like she’s been sleeping on the ground for the last month. She’s at her absolute limit and snaps, “No.”

He isn’t deterred. “Dude, if she took your last name—”

“ _Peter._ ”

“Oh come on, it would be awesome and you know it.”

“God,” she turns to him, “Okay, let me make this clear: we are not naming our child Luke or Leia, or Han, or Skywalker, _or_ Indiana Jones.”

He sinks down into his seat, pouting. After a small silence he mutters, “You know, it’s actually really hot that you know all of their names.”

“Holy shit, I can’t believe I had a kid with you.”

Peter grins at her because that’s totally the coolest sentence anyone has ever said in the history of all mankind, and MJ grins back against her will. “Shut up.”

He’s quiet for another minute, content to just sort of sit there and look at her looking at their baby. Then he turns to her, resting his arm against the back of the chair and squinting challengingly. “Alright, I’ve got one more for you.”

A brow quirks. “Lay it on me.”

* * *

May comes back when the sun is rising. 

She’s already got a smile on her face as she leans over the isolette, and it broadens when she listens for the baby’s heartbeat with her stethoscope. 

“Well?”

May meets Peter’s eyes. “Her heart sounds a little stronger than it did before.”

His expression is screaming that she just hung the moon and all the stars for him. May feels some of the tension she’s been carrying around for months on end just bleed away with that look. She breathes in and then out, reaching down to thread her fingers through his hair again.

His eyes are already glued back onto his baby.

May’s stomach flips. She still can’t wrap her head around any of this and she helped deliver the little _angelo bambino._

Abruptly May turns her attention onto MJ, whose chin is resting on her folded up arms and she scrutinises her daughter’s breathing patterns, lip between her teeth. 

“Michelle,” May says softly. “Has anyone come to check up on you to see how you’re doing?”

A careless shrug. “Not yet.”

“Okay,” May nods. “That’s—we’ll have to do an exam in a little while, alright?”

“Sounds cool.”

May looks between them and then shakes her head. She doesn’t have any interest in intruding further, so she quietly updates the chart and then ducks out of the NICU. 

It’s like a bad TV drama, finding Mary out in the hallway. Almost predictable, but still ridiculous enough to be unbelievable. 

“Hey, Reilly.”

There’s a belt squeezing her ribcage when she says, “Hey, Peters.”

“So the baby’s okay?”

May raises an eyebrow. “Like you actually care?”

Mary’s expression hardens. She sets her jaw and slips her hands into her jacket pockets, but May knows they’re balled up into fists in there. “’Course I care.”

“Oh, yeah,” May actually laughs. “Sure you do. That’s why you abandoned your four year old son and disappeared to _God_ knows where all those years ago! You don’t get to waltz into _my hospital_ after playing dead for almost _twenty years_ and act like you give a damn.”

Mary barely reacts. She only nods a little. “That’s fair. But I do. Give a damn, I mean.”

May takes a step back before she throws her hands. Instead she grips her stethoscope and glares at the outdated tile flooring. “You left your little boy all alone, Mary. You weren’t there when he was crying himself to sleep because he missed you, or when he got sick with pneumonia one winter and almost died, or when we lost Ben. You _weren’t there._ What… _what_ are you _doing_ here?”

Mary meets her eyes. They’re big and green and bloodshot. “Richard died right in front of me,” she whispers. “He was there one second, he was fine, and then… there was so much blood. And James—James did it. I don’t know why, but I never thought he would hurt me like that. I thought maybe he knew me even when he didn’t, but I was wrong. And I woke up the next morning and thought, if they can do that to him, they can do it to me.”

She takes a step forward. “I left because I didn’t trust myself to be around him. I left because I knew they would use him to hurt me. I left because I knew I wasn’t—I wouldn’t have been enough. Not without Richard.”

May feels the loss all over again like a sucker punch to the gut. She sags against the wall, thinking of her stupid brother-in-law and his dorky laugh and the beat up Chucks he always wore. The missing him is a wound that’ll never heal over all the way, just like with Ben. 

“May,” Mary says softly, “you can’t stand there and tell me I did the wrong thing when he turned out the way he did.”

May groans, wiping her cheeks. “Shit. _Fuck._ ” A shaky breath. “It was still shitty. You could have told me.”

“No, I couldn’t have. That would’ve made you a target, too.” 

“Well you should have told me about Tony,” May snaps, still bitter over that one. “I mean, God, you told _Ben_ before you told me?” 

Mary laughs. The sound tugs at May’s heartstrings. She’d missed it, missed _her,_ entirely too much than she’s willing to admit. 

“I thought you’d judge me.”

“I would have.”

“ _And,_ ” Mary leans against the wall to stand beside her, “I didn’t want everyone but Richard knowing. It would’ve made it so much worse if he ever found out.”

May huffs. “Like you would’ve let that happen.”

“You’re right, I probably wouldn’t have.”

May sinks to the floor and rests her elbows on her knees. Closes her eyes, head throbbing, on the sight of Mary doing the same. 

She hasn’t felt this overwhelmed since she’d woken up after the Snap to find Peter five years older and so much harder, so much edgier. 

Mary clears her throat. “I need you to know that there isn’t one part of me that wanted to be away, May. I really, _really_ thought that I was doing what was best for him. I thought that I was keeping him safe, and honestly, who’s to say I was wrong? I won’t apologise for doing what kept him alive. But I—I hate that I had to. I hate that you had to do it for me, and I can’t even hate that all the way through because you raised him a far sight better than I ever could have.”

“Don’t patronise me.”

“It’s matronise,” Mary says. “I think.”

“ _Mio Dio,_ ” May pinches the bridge of her nose, “you really haven’t changed, have you?”

“Hard to when you’re cryogenically frozen half the time,” Mary says with false brightness. 

May sighs. She risks another glance and finds Mary already looking at her, begging with her eyes like a kicked puppy. “Are you gonna be angry forever?”

“Not forever,” May says. “But for at least another few hours. Could be days, though. Maybe even weeks, I’d watch your back.”

“Would you rather I was actually dead?”

May snorts. “Just don’t go anywhere this time.” She pushes herself up and starts down the hall when Mary calls, “Hey, Reilly!”

May sighs. Turns on her heel. “Yeah?”

Mary grins at her, all soft around the edges. “I love you.”

May crosses herself. “God help me, but I love you, too. Now get some fucking sleep before you keel over.”

* * *

Time keeps passing even though Peter feels stuck within it, isolated inside the tiny universe of him and MJ and their kid. He counts the seconds between every one of her inhales and exhales, hovers anxiously while the NICU nurses carefully change her diaper, and stares at the neon green peak and fall of the EKG. 

Other parents come in and out. The nurses rove through the rows of babies, checking their vitals and fluids and temperatures. They don’t treat them like they’re made of glass, and Peter kind of flips his shit any time they get near his kid, because it _feels_ like she should be. It feels like she could break if he so much as breathes on her wrong. 

He stares. Bites his nails. Stares some more. Wills her to get better, to make it another minute, to keep going. Then he starts talking and just can’t seem to stop.

“Ben would get a kick out of you,” he says. “He loved babies, but they were usually scared shitless of him ’cuz he was so fuckin’ big, y’know? It made him so upset when they’d start crying. You’d probably fit right in the palm of his Goliath hand.” 

MJ snorts. Her eyelids are drooping and he knows he’s not faring much better, but he also isn’t the one who _had_ the kid, the one who carried her around and literally _grew her_ for eight months. 

Peter kneels beside her. “Hey, so crazy idea time.”

“Mhmm?”

“I’m thinking maybe you should sleep.”

MJ shakes her head. “I don’t wanna leave her alone.”

“You won’t be,” he points out. “I’m gonna be right here the whole time.” 

“I don’t…” MJ bites her lip and meets his eyes. “I don’t wanna be gone if she—”

Peter takes her hand. “Guess what?”

“What?”

“She wasn’t supposed to make it through the night. You know something? It’s been a whole five hours and there’s a big fat sun outside. You and me made the most badass baby to ever baby in the whole history of the universe. She’s strong and she’s not going anywhere, alright? Not while I’m here.”

“Okay.” MJ nods, mostly to herself. “Okay but—I had Pepper bring this,” she pulls a textbook out of the bag May had dropped off a little while ago. “It’s the one I used to read her. It’s from high school. Anyway, she really likes chapter eight. She’s super into electron arc therapy for some reason, I don’t know. Just—if you could read it to her?”

Peter takes it. “I will.”

For a long minute? MJ doesn’t move. Then she leans forward and kisses him, and it’s long but it’s gentle. “Thank you.”

“It’s no problem.”

“I meant—” she sighs. “Never mind. I’m gonna go nap. Wake me up if she… if anything happens.”

Peter finds he can’t quite speak. All he can do is squeeze her hand.

* * *

“Well, if it isn’t my first born in all of his unwashed glory.”

Peter raises his eyes from the battered textbook pages and finds Tony standing nearby, two cups of coffee in his hands and a soft look on his face. He sets the drinks down on the closest tray. 

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hey, kiddo.” Tony leans down to press his lips to the top of Peter’s head. “Yours is decaf, by the way. Been a hot minute, huh? Wanna talk about it?”

“I will,” Peter promises. “Just uh, not now.”

“Right, right,” Tony sits. “So how’s the first few hours of being a dad been?”

Peter opens his mouth. Closes it. Tries to think of some way to articulate the tumultuous bullshit that’s been churning inside of him for the last—six hours? Six months? Six years?

He says, “They come with hats.”

Tony laughs, but then Peter says, “I think it’s because—you know, her skin is so thin, and so she needs the extra warmth?”

Tony is already looking at him when Peter turns his head, and his eyes are full of something like concern or regret or empathy. Peter isn’t sure. He’s spent so long in the company of people that hide their emotions like second nature, he’s forgotten how to be among those that wear them openly.

“Kiddo,” Tony says softly, “have you slept any?”

Peter shakes his head.

“They told me she wasn’t supposed to make it. I wasn’t gonna—I wasn’t just gonna leave her all alone—”

“Okay.” Tony reaches out, “that’s just fine. How about you just lean on me, huh? You don’t have to sleep, but just do me a favor and rest?”

Peter doesn’t have to be told twice. He lets himself be pulled into his father’s embrace, lets his head fall against the older man’s shoulder. His eyes don’t close, though. They stay fixed on his baby girl. 

“Hey, guess what?”

Tony hums. “What?”

“We figured out a name for her.”

Tony’s interest perks. “Well don’t keep me in suspense.”

* * *

“Mary Parker is hovering in the hallway,” Pepper announces as she enters the NICU, some time after Tony leaves to check on MJ. “Should I do something, or…?”

Peter hums with disinterest. “If you wanna call security on a trained assassin, be my guest.”

She gives him a look. “I meant, do you want me to talk to her?”

“No,” Peter says. “Just let her work through the reclusive cat routine until she’s ready. Also: hi. You’re a grandma. Do you feel old? Did you grow grey hairs overnight?” 

“We both know I’m immortal.” Pepper’s heels click on the ground as she comes closer, dropping her purse so she can reach inside the incubator. “She’s so small.”

“I know, it’s terrifying.” 

Pepper touches her little hand. Tiny fingers faintly curl around her own thumb. “I think she likes me.”

Peter laughs. He leans over her shoulder, rests his chin there, and says, “Her name is Virginia.”

Just like that it’s hard to breathe, hard to see. She almost manages to choke back the little sound threatening to rip out of her throat, but only half succeeds. “I’m sorry, it’s just—allergies, y’know. I’m fine.” 

Peter smiles softly. He looks like hell, but that smile is a good thing. Then he kisses her cheek. “I don’t know where I’d be without you—”

“ _Peter,_ ” she cuts in, before he can start. 

“ _Pepper,”_ he counters, “you saved me. You were there for me when no one else was, and I—I swear to God, if I wuss out and start crying—”

He already is, but it’s okay. Pepper laughs as he fans his face for show. “Fuck. I’m just trying to say that I adore the shit out of you. Like, really. I love you. And I’m sorry for all the crap I put you through.”

“You don’t need to keep apologising, Peter.”

He sniffs. Puts his hands on his hips. “Feels like I do.”

“Well,” she loops her arm through his to pull him against her side, “ignore the urge.”

They both shut up, too transfixed by his daughter, until, “So Virginia, huh?”

A nod. “Virginia May. Virgo for short.”

Pepper’s smile is reflexive and wide. _Virgo,_ she thinks, and it’s like something clicking into place. 

* * *

Pepper agrees to stay with the baby, so Peter finally leaves the NICU after seven straight hours of the Boo show (no commercials, not so much as a pee break). Every time he blinks he sees pulse-ox levels and a respiratory rate of 30, which he knows is on the low side even for a newborn. The numbers are burned into his brain and he doesn’t even care, wants them there, needs to remember every single detail. 

Mary’s on the floor just like Pepper said she would be. She’s got her knees pulled to her chest and her eyes are rimmed with red. 

Peter wanders over, trying to be casual about it. He even puts his hands in his pockets and whistles. 

“Rough day?”

She laughs. “You could say that. How about yourself?”

Peter feels himself smile, but he knows it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I’ve had worse.”

“I bet you have.”

Peter clicks his tongue and kicks his foot out just to have something to do, some way to work off his nervous energy. “You don’t have to stay out here, y’know. You can come in and meet her. She’s your family, too.”

“Yeah,” Mary agrees. “I just can’t shake the feeling that I don’t deserve it. That I’m not welcome.” Abruptly, she clears her throat. “But that’s not—I’m not gonna bleed you for validation right now. I’m just… keeping a careful distance.”

Peter nods. Then he lowers himself to the ground to squat in front of her. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Where the hell has keeping a careful distance ever gotten you?”

Mary sighs as she rests her head against the wall. “It didn’t get _me_ anywhere, but that’s not the point. Never is.”

“So what _is_ the point?”

“Everyone else.”

He considers that for a moment, chews on it, rolls it with his tongue. Then, “Where’s Yelena?”

“Asleep on a gurney somewhere. She won’t leave as long as I’m still here.”

He nods. Stands, and gets halfway down the hall before stopping himself. “It’s hard to be human when you’ve got nothing to lose, Mary,” he tells her, turning. “You should meet your granddaughter.”

* * *

Peter slips inside MJ’s room and finds her curled up on the bed, still completely out of it. He perches in the space between her elbows and knees and watches her breathe. 

He can’t really stop himself from leaning down to kiss her nose. Even if he could, he probably wouldn’t. 

Or at least, he thinks so until MJ grunts and cracks an eye. 

“Fuck, I didn’t mean to wake you up. I’m sorry.” 

MJ clumsily swipes a hand down her face and props herself up, yawning. “S’fine. Virgo?”

“She’s still sleeping. Pep’s with her and May’s gonna take over when her shift ends in an hour. I tried to convince her to go home and get some rest instead, but she started yelling at me in Italian, so I let it go.”

MJ’s lip quirks up. “I love that woman. I want her to teach me all of her scary tricks.”

“So I take it you guys like, bonded?”

She snorts. “You could say that. I’ve been living with her since you left. Couldn’t stand being at home, bed was too big I guess.”

Peter feels something inside him wither at those words. He looks down at his lap and clears his throat so his voice won’t fracture when he asks, “Do you wanna talk about any of it?” 

MJ shrugs as she pulls on her cardigan, which he’s pretty sure actually belonged to Harley once. “Not much to say that hasn’t already been said. I mean, the baby wouldn’t show up on an ultrasound, so I didn’t even know if she was—anyway, I was just scared. Still am. What about you?”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

She scoots over and pats the vacated area. It’s not an invitation, it’s an order. 

Peter slowly sits. When he does, his back sighs in equal parts agony and relief. She watches him grit his teeth through the pain, brow furrowing when the spasms stop and he sighs. 

MJ hovers over him. “What did they do to you, Peter? Where have you been?”

A huge part of himself doesn’t even want to tell her. He doesn’t want to tell anyone ever again, never wants to speak of it for the rest of his life. He’d be perfectly happy compartmentalising the whole ordeal, locking it away, shoving it toward the back of the metaphorical fridge like old jelly. 

But what was it that Nat had said? _You think all of your problems couldn’t have been solved if you’d just communicated with her?_

Before he can stop it, the story falls out of his mouth clumsily and ragged, weeded of the worst parts even still. His mouth is dry by the time he’s done. MJ asks about his mother, asks about her gifts, and then, “Do you have them?”

Peter hesitates. Then he nods haltingly. 

“So Virgo…?”

“Yeah, probably.”

MJ absorbs that. Then, “And your mom is alive? Seriously? You’re absolutely sure it’s her and not a robot or one of those clones or something?” 

It’s the third time she’s asked about Mary, and he grins. “Yeah. She’s been hovering around the hospital, you’ll probably meet her at some point.”

MJ flops back against the pillows. “I can’t even wrap my head around that.” 

“Yeah, it was hard for me, too.”

MJ is quiet for a minute, ruminating. Then she taps his chest. “You still haven’t told me what they did to you.”

“Oh, so you picked up on that?”

“ _Peter.”_

She’s practically begging, voice rough and imploring, a chisel of a thing he’ll always break under the force of. Peter closes his eyes and looks away. Tries to keep his voice casual when he lists it all off: “Electroshock therapy. Waterboarding. Sleep deprivation, starvation, the works.”

MJ stares with parted lips. Then, “For how long?”

“Four months.”

“ _Fuck.”_

It’s a vehement hiss and she sits up with the force of her fury, hands fisting and flexing against her thighs. Peter reaches for her, any part of her, to hold onto. “Hey, I’m fine.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, really,” he tries to get her to look at him, “I mean shit sucks, sure, but I’m alive. You’re alive, Virgo’s alive. That’s all I care about.” 

“And Ross?”

He’s never seen her eyes so dark. It scares him, especially when they glint at his proclamation of, “Dead.” 

MJ nods. Keeps nodding, and then pinches the bridge of her nose, face twisting in something like agony. A strangled, pained kind of noise is ripped from the back of her throat. 

Then she’s crying. 

For a minute, Peter just gapes like an idiot. When he finally recovers, he moves: pulling her right up against his chest and between his knees, then settling back against the bed. He buries his face in her curls and breathes her in: lavender and chamomile, sharp but delicate. 

“You kept me alive,” he murmurs softly. “I forgot everything for a little while except you. I could never forget you.”

“Oh,” MJ whispers, and wipes her face furiously. “God, shit, I’m supposed to be the one comforting _you._ ”

Peter feels himself smile. He brings her hand to his lips and kisses the back of her palm. “You are.”

MJ shifts to look up at him, _really_ look, and Peter’s thinking that maybe she’s right—maybe it really doesn’t matter what happened, maybe the only thing that matters is this: the current running between them that makes their blood beat in unison, the flint of warmth that ignites with every touch and word and glance. He loves her so much it’s hard to breathe sometimes, hard to think. It’s like drowning, but he’d happily let the water fill his lungs. 

“What?” MJ breathes. 

He smiles, shakes his head, and reaches up to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. “It’s just nice to hold you. Thought I never would again.”

MJ’s lips part and his gaze flits down to look at them. He’s just about to kiss her when the door to the room jerks open. 

“Oh!” Tony exclaims. “Hey! I didn’t think—”

Peter’s heart is now hammering in his chest so hard it feels like it’s about to rip itself free. He rubs it in a vain attempt to calm himself. 

MJ’s hand comes to rest on his ankle. The weight is strangely grounding. “It’s fine, Anthony. What’s up?”

“Hmm? Nothing, I just thought I’d check on you. Bought you one of those gross green drinks you like so much.”

Her eyes light up and she makes grabby hands for the matcha latte. “You didn’t have to do that.”

His dad gives her a look. MJ covers her blush by sucking from the straw. Peter’s confused expression ricochets between them. “Uh, what?”

Tony sniffs. “We bonded. It’s whatever. How are you feeling, squirt?”

Peter grunts and falls backward, massaging his temples. “Shredded.”

“Yeah, well,” Tony puts his hand on Peter’s forehead like he’s trying to feel for some kind of fever, “that’ll happen after being kept in captivity for four months.”

His mouth is dry. “So Pep told you?”

“You bet,” Tony’s thumb ghosts over Peter’s cheekbone. “Barnes filled me in on the rest.” 

“And Mary? Have you talked to her?”

“A little.” His dad shifts and then settles on the edge of the bed. He looks at both of them, concern wrought all across his face, turning his lips down. 

Peter bites down on his tongue but can’t stop himself from saying, “You didn’t seem all that surprised to see her.”

“Yeah, I uh,” Tony clears his throat awkwardly, “Steve let it slip a few months back.”

“God, that man is _such_ a gossip.”

His dad smirks a little. “I wouldn’t be too hard on him. I was kind of insufferable about the whole thing. Cried a time or two.” 

And just like that the awful feeling is back, dark and thick and creeping up from the pit of his stomach to his throat, threatening to choke him. He swallows hard. “Dad, I…”

“No, hey,” Tony grabs his hand and squeezes, “that came out wrong, kiddo. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I was just—worried out of my mind, y’know, kinda—very much high strung. But I don’t blame you, okay? _No one_ blames you. Isn’t that right, Michelle?”

Peter risks a glance at MJ, who’s already staring, no end to all that warmth in her eyes. “That’s right,” she says. 

And that’s good to hear, really, but it doesn’t change the fact that _he_ still blames himself and probably always will. 

* * *

It’s the middle of the night when Nat shows up. 

She skulks in soundlessly, hands tucked into the pockets of her dark trench coat, head cocked to the side as she observes him from a few feet away. 

Peter ignores her theatrics and looks up lazily, resting his cheek on his balled up fist. “How did it go?”

Her shoulders fall. She comes a little closer, furtive like a cat, circling around him like she’s afraid she’ll get snatched up or swatted at. “Badly.”

Peter had figured as much. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not particularly,” Nat says. “Maybe some other time.”

Which knowing her means never _,_ and he’s not so sure he can just accept that lying down. Not when it’s Clint, who he knows she never got to love the way she wanted to. Not when he died for her. And especially not when she just sat down with Laura Barton and had to say it out loud, had to state it as a fact: _Clint is dead._

So he watches her and pretends he’s not, and she pretends she doesn’t notice. 

Nat leans over the isolette. Her lip quirks up. 

“Tiny.”

Peter grins against his will. He covers it by sipping the now-cold coffee Pep had brought him a while ago. Nat sits, and they listen to the steady beeping of the monitors for a minute. 

“I didn’t even know she existed until a day ago.”

“Trippy. How’s it feel now?” asks Nat, in a way that suggests she already knows the answer.

“She’s the most important person in the world to me. I mean I’m terrified out of my damn mind, but she’s here and she’s—she’s mine. That’s my kid right there. That’s my daughter.”

Nat hums. “Thought of any names yet?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Virginia May.”

Peter finally rips his eyes away from Virgo. Nat, interestingly enough, is still watching her. He waits while she absorbs it, notes when her eyes start to shine and her head tilts in quiet thought.

“That’s a really nice name,” she tells him, a little roughly.

“Yeah? Thought so. Just wanted to get the godmother’s approval before we wrote it down on the certificate and everything.”

Her head whips around. “ _What?”_

“Oh please,” Peter waves her off, “who else?”

“I don’t know, literally anyone? May? Pepper?”

“They’re already family, and I wanted—I wanted you to know that Virgo’s your family, too. I wanted to give you someone to be for her.”

Nat chews on that. Then, “MJ’s okay with that?”

He shifts a little. “We talked about it for a while, but yeah. I said if she’s gonna make the godfather Steve Rogers, then you should get to be godmother.”

Nat raises an eyebrow. “Steve Rogers is the godfather of your kid?”

“Believe me, I’m still trying to process that myself, but yeah.”

Nat grins. “Did he cry?”

“Like a baby.” 

“I wish I’d seen it.”

He hums. Leans forward and strokes Virgo’s leg when she starts to fuss a little, searching with those big brown eyes. Everything else falls away when he looks at her. “Hi,” he says, and she stills. “Hey, baby, it’s just me. You’re okay, now.”

Virgo reaches. Her tiny hand touches his much larger one and it’s literally the coolest thing that’s ever happened, period. Michelangelo’s _Creation of Adam_ who? 

Nat brings him back to reality by smacking a _potseluy_ on his cheek. “I’m gonna go break into Steve’s house. We godparents have much to discuss.”

“Yeah, you have fun with that.”

“Oh, I will. And Petya?” He looks up. “Get some damn sleep. You look like you’re a light breeze away from getting knocked onto your ass.” 

* * *

Even after a nap MJ’s migraine still hasn’t gone away, but she refuses to complain about it. Doesn’t feel right when Virgo’s barely breathing as it is. 

She takes the early morning shift while Peter (hopefully) uses her bed to at least get some semblance of rest. MJ doesn’t mind; she’s just fine where she is and probably wouldn’t be able to stomach being anywhere else. 

Pepper comes by with breakfast and a change of clothes: fresh sweats, clean socks, plenty of pads. May drops in periodically to check on Virgo. She listens to her lungs and heart, studies the notes the other nurses have made in her chart, and mutters under her breath every now and again. 

“Is she okay?” MJ always finds herself asking, stiff with anxiety. 

“Hmm? Oh, sorry. Her stitches look good and her respiratory rate is a little higher, which is a great sign.”

“But is she still…?” 

May hesitates. “She made it through the first day, which is exactly what we were hoping for. We just have to make sure to keep her hydrated and make sure she doesn’t end up with FTT.”

_FTT._ Failure to thrive. 

MJ nods, feeling queasy. She scoots her chair impossibly closer to the incubator, unable to shake the fear in the pit of her stomach: Scylla in the Triangle, churning ocean waters. “Is it weird that I miss her? I mean I know I’m right here, but I can’t touch her or hold her, and I… I miss knowing I could keep her safe.” 

May’s eyes are soft. She reaches across the distance and brushes MJ’s bangs back, just like she’d done in the delivery room. “It’s not weird.”

MJ nods jerkily and wipes away a stubborn tear, frustrated. “Shit.”

“Don’t be hard on yourself,” May says. “Your hormones are all out of whack right now and with everything else… God, just promise me you’ll try to take it easy.”

MJ nods, not really meaning it. “Yeah, totally.”

The hours pass. Peter comes back, and he’s furtive about whether or not he actually got any sleep. Still, he kisses her cheek and pulls her against him, and he smells just the same as he used to. MJ closes her eyes when he starts playing with her hair. She falls asleep to the sound of him reading about alpha decay. 

When she wakes up again, they’re not alone. 

MJ’s eyes are too heavy to open. She regains consciousness slowly, barely registering the hushed voices of Peter and someone else. 

“I’m just worried.” 

She doesn’t recognise the woman who speaks next. “You were born a month early. Did you know that?” 

Peter hums. MJ feels the vibrations of it against her back. “Ben told me it was why I was such a pipsqueak. Said I was too big for my boots.”

A small laugh, a shifting body. “I used to sit by you and watch you breathe, all day, for _hours._ I wouldn’t even blink. I just… God, I wanted to do it for you because it looked like it hurt so much, and I _never_ wanted you to hurt.”

Peter’s grip around MJ tightens a little. His nose presses against the back of her head. “Yeah, I think I know the feeling.”

Peter’s mother. This is Peter’s _mother_ talking, his mother in the room with them. MJ feels her entire body go stiff at the realisation, which in no way escapes Peter’s notice. 

He pulls back from her a little. “Are you awake?”

MJ shakes her head. “No.” 

“For sure, for sure. You wanna know what I think?”

MJ hums. “What?”

“I _think_ that’s a big fat lie.”

She finds herself grinning a little and reluctantly leans forward. The instant she does, the whole room starts spinning. MJ doubles forward and puts her head in her hands. 

Peter hasn’t let go and he especially won’t, now. His grip around her waist is probably the only thing keeping her from face-planting onto the floor. “Emmie?” 

“I’m fine,” she says. “Just tired.” 

“You’ve been asleep for six hours.”

MJ blinks. “I’ve been asleep for six hours and you’ve just been sitting there?”

“Well, yeah,” he says, like it’s no big deal at all. Then, “oh hey, I can feel my arm again! Neat.”

MJ shakes her head and looks right at Mary Parker, and despite never having met her before, demands, “Can you believe this asshole? I can’t stand him. Peter, go eat something. Go pee. Oh my god.”

Peter is still wiggling his fingers. “Yeah, yeah, I will. Oh, Mary, meet MJ. She’s the apple of my eye, the orange of my nose, the grape of my ear hole—”

“ _Peter.”_

“ _Peeing,_ God,” he snaps, raising his arms in mock defense and then standing. “Just—”

“Yeah,” MJ agrees, knowing what he means without having to listen to him say it, because it’s the same thing they’ve been telling each other every time either of them leave the NICU: _get me if anything changes._

The sliding doors shut quietly behind him. MJ moves forward, still a little dizzy, and fixes Virgo’s cannula. 

Mary Parker is staring. 

“So,” MJ says slowly, “where the hell have you been?”

Mary’s careful expression doesn’t change. She only tilts her head to the side. “A lot of places. Estonia, Croatia, Vladivostok, some more I can’t even remember.”

“So you were like, a HYDRA operative?”

“On and off.”

“And you just like, casually abandoned your kid and subjected yourself to a life of exile because the alternative was his death?”

They hold eye contact with one another until Mary blinks. “Yeah, that’s basically the gist of it.”

“Badass,” MJ says. Already she can’t imagine leaving Virgo like that, can’t imagine just dropping everything knowing they might never see each other again, but if it was to keep her safe? 

“Not that it’s my place to forgive you,” MJ adds quickly, “but I guess it tracks. So do you wanna tell me some embarrassing baby stories about Peter?” 

* * *

Peter stops dead in the middle of the corridor. 

Twelve feet away, so do Pepper and Morgan. 

Her hand is in Pepper’s, but the minute she sees him, her eyes widen and she rips free. Peter barely has a chance to register what just happened before she’s gone. 

Pepper is just as stunned. “Shit,” she hisses. “I thought it would be good for her to come visit. I was gonna text you before we went into the NICU—”

“No, it’s okay,” Peter reassures as he passes her. “Just go check on MJ, would you?”

He doesn’t spare her another glance, but instead follows after Morgan’s strawberry shampoo scent. He keeps going until he finds her in a stairwell, curled up against the wall with her head braced between her knees, crying.

“Oh.” Peter sinks down to his knees in front of her, chest fissuring. “Baby, hey.”

He tries to move her hands away. Morgan reacts the instant he touches her. She lashes out, shoving at him, hitting him with her tiny ineffectual fists and sobbing all the while. He can barely sparse out what she’s saying, but he catches the gist of it: she’d thought he was dead, she thinks he left her, _why_ did he leave her?

He doesn’t have an answer. All he can do is shake his head uselessly and try to stop the punching. “I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry. Hey,” he croaks, “come on, Mongoose, stop it.” 

At the sound of his nickname for her, she crumbles. Peter holds her while she bawls and presses kiss after kiss to her little face, cradling her just like he used to when she was a toddler. 

Eventually, Morgan pulls back. Her cheeks are red to match her eyes. Peter carelessly wipes the tears and snot away with his shirtsleeve. She sniffs and hiccups and then, “Why’d you go away?”

He tries to come up with a reason without telling her the truth, because no six year old needs to hear that. “Morgan… I didn’t mean to be gone so long. Some bad people took me, baby, and I got held up.”

She wipes her flushed face again. “Did they h-hurt you?”

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Yeah, they did.”

She studies him for a long minute in that way she’s always had, like she’s looking right at his soul or something, and then gingerly pushes the corners of his mouth up into a smile. “You’re okay, now?”

Peter laughs. “I’m okay,” he agrees, kissing her nose. “I’m gonna be just fine. What about you?”

A shrug. “Missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” he says, meaning it with everything in him. 

And he knows it’s not over, knows it’s not enough. She’s too smart to accept his half-formed excuses at face value, but also smart enough to know that pushing him will only make it worse. Peter pulls her back into his arms and holds her, strokes her hair and rocks them both while she cries into the crook of his neck some more. 

She’s not his daughter, she’s not Virgo, but he doesn’t love her any less. 

* * *

He walks into the NICU with Morgan in his arms and finds that Mary is still there, along with Pepper and MJ. There’s a strange energy in the air that isn’t quite tension, and if he focuses hard enough he can tell exactly what’s rolling off of all of them: fear and relief from Pepper, exhaustion and intrigue from MJ, confusion and unease from Mary. 

He doesn’t bother trying to dissect all of it, but steps closer and nudges Morgan’s cheek with his nose. “You ready?”

“Yessir,” she says, and scrambles out of his arms the minute her sneakers make contact with the chair he sets her down on. Morgan’s eyes widen as she looks down at Virgo. She’s quiet for all of ten seconds, which he thinks is probably a new record. Then, “Can I hold her?”

Peter kisses the top of her head. “Not yet. She’s still too small.”

“Was I this small when I was born?”

Peter’s smile falters a little. “No, you weren’t.” 

“Oh,” Morgan says, and returns her gaze to Virgo. “Do you think she’s cold?”

He loves her for asking. “As long as she stays inside the glass, she’ll be warm enough. You can touch her if you want, though.”

Morgan doesn’t reply except to drop to her knees so she can reach inside. “She’s super soft,” Morgan whispers, retracting her hand like she’s been burned. “I don’t wanna hurt her.”

“You won’t, I promise.”

“I don’t wanna start off my career as an aunt by breaking her,” Morgan says, to which Peter snorts. 

“Alright, if you’re gonna be a diva about it,” he says, picking her back up. He drops into the chair between MJ and Pepper. Morgan settles against him with a sigh, fisting at his shirt and tucking her head under his chin. 

“I should probably go,” Mary says, abruptly shooting to her feet. 

“That’s probably for the best,” Pepper agrees swiftly. “I think there’s a capacity on how many people can be in here at once, anyway.” 

Peter squints at his adopted mother, and then at his birth mother. What a head trip. “You don’t have to.”

“Yeah, but I should. You’ve had a long day and I need to check on Yelena, find us a place to stay. She’s been stealing food out of the cafeteria and scaring the nurses.”

He doesn’t even think before saying, “You could always stay with us.”

Pepper and MJ’s heads both whip around, but he ignores them. Mary stares at him for a good few seconds, mouth open. Then she snaps it shut and shakes her head. “I’ll be fine. Worst comes to worst, I’ll have to crash on James’ couch.”

Then she’s gone. 

Peter finds Pepper glaring at him. “What?” he demands. 

She scoffs. “Nothing.”

“No, really, lay it on me. You don’t think I’ve replaced you, do you? Because I promise I haven’t. I still love you big time, Pep.”

Her anger melts into exasperation. “God, you’re impossible.”

“It’s part of my charm.”

“As riveting as all of this is,” MJ cuts in, “I’ve got a huge headache, so I’m gonna go lie down.”

Peter frowns. “Do you want me to—?”

“No, just… stay with the baby. Please.”

He hesitates, but only briefly. There’s no reason to argue about something so simple. “Okay. Are you sure you’re alright?”

MJ rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure. It’s just a migraine, Peter.”

* * *

The days pass slowly. MJ is sent home after four of them, when the OB on call assesses her and determines that her abdomen is healing nicely. 

“It hurts, though,” MJ says. 

“Well, you just had a C-section,” he replies, pressing lightly against the area. His pager buzzes. “Stitches look good, no infection there. I’m signing your discharge papers.”

Then he’s gone. MJ still spends the rest of the day in the hospital with Virgo, though, and only goes home when Peter shows up for the night shift. 

They start to divide their days like that: MJ in the morning, Peter at night. They hardly see each other and MJ hates it, but she’s grateful that Virgo’s never alone. She knows it’s only because Peter is Peter and May is May that they’re allowed to stay past visiting hours, and doesn’t know what the hell she’d do otherwise.

When MJ goes home, she sleeps. Sometimes Charlie sneaks into the room and curls up next to her. MJ’s glad of the company even if her sister _is_ all elbows and knees. 

Two weeks pass like that, and then three. MJ wakes up with a pounding head and an achy body and attributes it to sitting in those shitty plastic hospital chairs all day, doing nothing but reading from a tiny textbook script. 

One night, Peter comes home after only four hours at the hospital. 

MJ’s curled up on the bed with her head buried under a pillow to block out the light. Peter lifts it. “Hi.”

MJ sits up and regrets it immediately, but tries not to let it show. “What are you doing here? Did something happen?”

“No, but dad told me to let him sit with her tonight. Said if I didn’t take at least one night off he was gonna have a heart attack.”

MJ feels a ridiculous, stupid kind of relief. She pulls him onto the bed without even thinking about it and lets him wrap her up in his arms. MJ closes her eyes and rests her head on his chest. The pain eases like ebbing tides, but it’ll come back they way they do, too. 

Peter runs his fingers up and down her arm. “How do you feel?”

“Tired,” MJ murmurs, which is usually her answer these days. “Kind of lightheaded.”

“Have you been drinking enough water?”

“Tons.”

He frowns and draws back, pushing her hair out of her eyes. “Did you eat today?”

MJ grunts and burrows under his chin again, not eager to start a conversation. She feels kind of sick just thinking about food, anyway. “Not hungry.”

Peter is quiet for a moment, and in the back of her mind she knows that he’s unsettled, but she’s too exhausted to do anything about it or even care. “I’m gonna go make you some soup, okay?”

“No,” she whines, wrapping her legs around his, “I don’t want you to go anywhere. M’jus’ sleepy. Stay and snuggle.” 

She feels the corner of his lip curl up against her forehead. “I would, but I still think you should eat. I’ll be right back, okay? It’ll just be something light. Soup and saltines.” 

MJ pouts as he worms out of her clingy grasp. “I’ll remember this,” she slurs against the quilt. 

Peter snorts. He hovers on the edge of the bed for a minute before leaving, and he’ll always wish he hadn’t. 

* * *

Harley had dropped a cake when Peter had first come home.

It had been just the two of them in the house: MJ was still at the hospital and the girls had been in school. He’d done a double-take when Peter had walked into the kitchen, dropped his duffel, and said, “Howdy, partner.”

Harley had sat down hard. He’d stared at what remained of his cake, shell-shocked. Then, 

“I heard about the baby.”

And that had been that. 

Now they move around each other in the very same room. Peter hovers over the soup while Harley goes about preparing dinner for everyone else. They don’t really talk for the most part, but then again, they never have. Their relationship was constructed entirely on the mutual understanding of emotion without ever having to ask. They only look, only feel around in the dark of each other’s hearts, and know. 

The TV is on. Charlie’s watching a basketball game while she does her homework. Ariel is upstairs somewhere, probably talking to Cassie on the phone. 

He should be comfortable. He should be relaxed. In the very least, he should be able to shake the growing sense of danger tickling the base of his spine, stirring his stomach. There’s no threat, right? Everything is fine, right?

“Pass the salt?” asks Harley, but Peter never gets around to it. 

He’s moving even before he hears it. The thud sounds halfway up the first stairwell. Their bedroom is on the third floor. The seconds between it and getting to her cease to exist. 

She’s on the floor and then he is too, hands shaking but moving, trying to get her on her side while her whole body convulses. 

“Fuck,” he hisses, “shit, fuck.”

Harley’s shoes thunder against the floorboards and then he’s there, right there, just like always. “Holy shit,” he breathes. “What’s wrong with her? What’s happening?!”

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t _know._ His mind is racing a mile a minute down a dead-end highway. “Call—” he stops, thinking better of _911._ An ambulance will take 15 minutes at least to get here, and they don’t have that kind of time. “Call Happy.”

Happy’ll be faster. 

Harley doesn’t even question it. He runs to the bedside table and grabs the phone, fumbling with it, white-faced. “ _Fuck fuck fuck,”_ he whispers while he waits for Happy to pick up. 

MJ stops seizing. Peter’s body is on autopilot, feeling for her pulse. It’s barely there and jumping erratically. He gathers her up into his lap and pushes her hair back. 

“Don’t you dare leave me,” he whispers. “Don’t even _think_ about it, okay?”

Not after everything. He flat out refuses to lose her again.

* * *

She’d seized two more times on the way over and then they’d wheeled her into the ER—a bunch of people he doesn’t know, with faces he doesn’t recognise. They’re in a Brooklyn hospital. A nurse with painted nails had taken him by the arm and told him to go sit in the waiting area.

“We’re gonna do everything we can,” she’d said, “but you have to give the doctors space to work.”

And so he sits against the wall with Harley on his left and Happy on his right, bouncing his knee while the medical staff runs around them. The clerks talk on the phone behind the check-in desk, the doctors flit from bed to bed with a hoard of white-coated students taking notes behind them. Careless, like it’s any other day. This is their normal. 

Around twenty minutes in, Happy says he’s gonna call Tony and Pepper. Peter shrugs. He counts the minutes with the clock on the wall. 

Thirty. Sixty. 

At midnight he starts to pace. His nerves are fried, his heart is pounding, and he _knows._

He knows. 

Even before the doctors walk up to them, he can feel it. For the past hour it’s like he’s been carrying around something dead. He can smell it on the air, can feel it all around them. 

“Mr. Parker?” 

He stops. Nods. “Yeah.” 

The man who speaks is faceless. His voice is flat. “Mr. Parker, Ms. Jones suffered from several seizures that eventually culminated in a stroke. We believe she was suffering from undiagnosed eclampsia, given the amount of blood loss and her other symptoms. We used all of our capabilities to stop it from advancing any further, but unfortunately her condition resulted in...” he looks down at his red-speckled sneakers, “resulted in severe brain damage. There’s very little hope she’ll ever regain consciousness. I’m so sorry.”

And it’s not real. That’s Peter’s first thought. _It’s not real._

There’s no way it can be. Those words don’t make any sense. None of this does. 

She’s too strong for this, too stubborn. This isn’t how the story ends. 

Peter shakes his head. He can’t hear them. Happy and Harley and the doctor are all reaching out, edging forward, saying things—itching to help, to hold.

Peter jerks away from the first hand that touches him. He doesn’t even know who it belongs to. He keeps walking, heart pounding, until he’s standing on the other side of the sliding ER doors. 

Then he falls to his knees in the mid-November snow, and it’s cold, and that makes it real. 

**Author's Note:**

> :)))))))
> 
> please lmk ur thots uwu


End file.
